Response to Online Resources

The Holocaust was a dark time of prejudice, oppression, systematic murder, and injustice. Jews, the mentally and physically disabled, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavic people, and political dissidents were persecuted on ideological, behavioral, and genetic grounds during the quest of the Nazi Government to create a purely German empire. These people were considered “race enemies” and were thought of by the Nazi Party as having “a life unworthy of living.” After reading the “8 Stages of Genocide” document, I found myself hoping that everyone in the world had access to this document and was fully aware of the “set of circumstances which occur or which are created to build the climate in which genocide can take place.” It is crucial that through our understanding of these “circumstances” and past genocides, we prevent future catastrophes.  And, as Elie Wiesel once said, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”  In the Kristallnacht video, the narrator stated that being “silent” during the formation of genocide and during genocide itself is equivalent to “direct participation.” This reminded me very much of a powerful poem that I read in 7^th grade history class: it begins, “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- because I was not a Jew” and, after a list of similar phrases, ends with, “Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.” Another “online resource” that stood out to me was the “Resistance in the Concentration Camps” video. Despite my many years of history class, I don’t think I was ever in a course that really discussed the resistance movements that took place during the Holocaust.