Introduction

Introduction My name is Ryan Baxendale and I am an 18 year old senior at Westborough high school. I am very involved in many things as a student at Westborough high school, including sports, community service, and academics. I play football, hockey, and lacrosse, but have to sit out my senior year of hockey and lacrosse due to a torn ACL that occurred during the Thanksgiving Day football game. I am a family, man and family is the entity in my life that I value most. I have a big family as a result of both parents being divorced, and the big family makes leads to appreciate everything that I have. I decided to partake in the Facing History and Ourselves course because I had heard many good things about it from other students in the school. I had heard that it was not just a normal class, but one that you want to get involved in, and a class that keeps your attention every single day. This was something that made me want to take the class, and get involved in the class. I also chose to take the course because I wanted to learn more about the Holocaust. The Facing History and Ourselves course is one that takes you through the experiences of the Holocaust from a first person view of a Jewish person. It also puts you through situations that are involved with race and discrimination. It’s the type of class that will impact you as a person and change the way you may view certain things in life. It gives you an understanding of how the Holocaust happened and how horrible it was. This course is a course that everyone should partake in.

What Facing History and Ourselves meant to me

What Facing History and Ourselves Meant To Me

When I first started going to the Facing History and Ourselves course in the beginning of the year I wasn’t really sure of what to expect in the class. I had heard that the class was very meaningful from many people who had taken the class before me. I had no doubt in this but I was just waiting for the class to start impacting and interesting me like other people had said it done to them. Things really picked up in the class when we started to learn about the Holocaust and exactly what had gone on during the Holocaust including all the intense details about it. As soon as we started the Holocaust I knew that the course was going to be intense, meaningful, and impactful. The movies and discussions that we had about the Holocaust were so descriptive of what had happened that it was very meaningful to me as a person.

The Facing History and Ourselves course has benefitted me in many ways as both a student and a person over the time of the class. It benefitted me as a result of being such an intense and meaningful and in-depth course. One of the most important things that have benefitted me from taking this course has been developing a better knowledge of the Holocaust. Coming into the call I knew what the Holocaust was and I had a basic understanding of what had happened, like most of the other students in the class at that time. I gained more knowledge than I though I ever would have about the Holocaust throughout the course. The first think I got a better understanding of about the Holocaust was how Hitler had gained power and how he rose to captivate the entire German population. I learned how he manipulated millions of people into believing what he wanted to believe, which gave him the power to execute what he wanted to. He did this through propaganda, including videos, and newspapers. He created a hateful message towards the Jews through movies projecting them as demons and not even real people. He even had books written about historically negative things about Jews. He also blamed them for all of the evil including political problems in the world. The next thing that I had learned about in the class was the steps leading up to the concentration camps stage of the Holocaust. I learned about the ghettos and what had happened inside the ghettos. I learned about how bad the Jews were mistreated and what exactly had happened to them. Through movies I saw the true cruelty that had occurred in the ghettos and how brutal the conditions were also. The next think that I got a better knowledge of was the next stage of the Holocaust, the concentration and extermination camps. For the final steps I learned about how the Jews were transported to the camps and the conditions that were present on the trains. I learned about what had happened when the Jews had got to the camps and just how brutal the conditions at the camps were. From the movies that I had watched I learned about the horrors in the camps from labor, gas chambers, beatings, tortures, shootings, and the cremating of millions of people. All the knowledge that I have gained about the Holocaust was learned through intense and meaningful ways, and these have really imprinted the knowledge into me and has changed my perception of the Holocaust forever. Another way that the Facing History and Ourselves has benefitted me is that I now appreciate all the things in my life so much more. I appreciate all the opportunities that I have in my life, and all of the things that I have in life. Seeing the conditions that the Jews were put through throughout the Holocaust made me thankful for the ability to live a safe life with many great things in it. Watching them lose everything that they had and seeing everything get taken from them made me appreciate everything more. The thing I appreciate most as a result of the course would have to be my Family. Watching families get ripped apart and killed in front of my eyes was the hardest thing for me to watch in the course. I could never imagine myself having to go through that. Watching everything happen in the movies made me appreciate my family, even more than I already did before taking the course. The course made me realize the racism and discrimination that people face everyday in the present world. In the beginning of the course we went through many scenarios of recent racism and discrimination that is occurring today. I never had viewed these things before like I did in this class. The discussions and topics we talked about and viewed in relation to racism and discrimination have changed me as a person. I now view things related to racism and discrimination with a more open mind.

Throughout the Facing History and Ourselves Course we read, viewed, and talked about many topics relating to the Holocaust. All of these facets of the class were very meaningful and impacting to me. The most meaningful and impactful video that I had watched in the class was the raw footage of the Camps that was filmed after the Americans had conquered the camps and had won the war. This video contained some of the most horrific scenes that I have ever seen in my life. It contained scenes of dead bodies being pushed by bulldozers, and piles of dead bodies just rotting out in the open. This movie really impacted me and I will never view the Holocaust the same after seeing that video. Another film that had a severely meaningful impact on me was the clip from the movie, “Sarah’s Choice”. In this clip, a mom had to choose between her son or daughter for one of them to live. The only way that they would live is if she allowed herself to be raped by one of the guards at the camp. Seeing this really hit me hard. I could never make a choice like that nor even imagine being in her situation. It was awful to watch as the guards dragged her daughter away from her to be killed. I will never forget that clip. The movie “The Grey Zone” was also another movie that I watched in the course that had a great impact on me. This movie was about the people who worked in the camps, and also about the actions that had occurred within the camps. This movie had such a meaningful impact on me because it had so many scenes that were hard to watch. From the shootings to the gas chambers to the torturing, they all will impact me as a person and give me a better understanding to the horrors that happened during the Holocaust.

Works Cited

Facing History and Ourselves. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013

Jewish Kids in Concentration Camp. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013

Jews Getting Off Train. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013

Map of Camps WW2. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013