Holocaust Refletion (Rachel Kritzik)

Reading about the Holocaust in books, no matter how vivid and horrifying, can never have the same effect as watching a video or looking at a picture of the actual events unfold. In the video about Kristallnacht, physically seeing all of these synagogues falls was extremely powerful and moving. One of the things that shocked me the most about the video is how the rest of the German population, and the world, for that matter, did absolutely NOTHING in response to it. 2,500 innocent Jewish men, women, and children died that night, almost the amount killed on 9/11, and no one did anything about it. That’s terrifying in and of itself. What’s even more terrifying is that Kristallnacht was only the beginning.

Over the years of studying World War II and the Holocaust, I’ve watched various scenes of “Band of Brothers”, and I have to say, that liberation scene from the concentration camp easily affected me the most. Being Jewish myself, it completely breaks my heart to see how something so horrible could’ve happened to an entire race of people. And for what? So Hitler could have someone to blame for his country’s own problems; it’s ridiculous. I mean, the people in these concentration camps don’t even look human anymore. They’re bony and sick and pale and it’s horrible. I distinctly remember one part of the “Band of Brothers” clip where this sickly old man goes up to one of the soldiers and just starts embracing and kissing him and wouldn’t let go. These people were so broken, and I know this was just a movie and they were all actors, but I also saw real pictures too and it distressed me even more.

In the “Walk through Auschwitz” video, there are some extremely depressing pictures of the victims there. Piles and piles of people who look more like zombies than anything, dead. Pictures of people being herded around like sheep, probably headed to their death too. And even just the black and white text at the beginning, talking about the “starvation cells,” and “standing cells” where they would have 4 men in a 16 square foot room, forced to stand all night, after an excruciatingly long day of working. There were experiments done on Russians and Poles, where they were injected with a lethal pesticide and up to seven hundred Jews were killed in a gas chamber at one time. Everything about Auschwitz is awful, and to think that something like this could happen to millions upon millions of innocent people is horrifying and it sends shivers down my spine every time I think about it.