Connor Gibbs' Blog: January 2011

The Facing History and Ourselves course is a very unique and special class. I can honestly say that I have never taken another course remotely similar to this one. The main focus of the course is to examine racism, bias, and prejudice in a historical context. Students study intolerance, genocide, and the Holocaust in order to make correlations between history and the difficult moral and ethical choices they are faced with everyday. In the course students watch films, discuss activities and topics in groups, and engage in class discussions regarding the topic matter. At first, the main reason as to why I chose to take this course was because of my huge interest in the Holocaust and World War II. I thought this was a standard history course that focused mainly on that time period in history. I soon realized that the course was about much more than that. The course described why these events happened and what triggered the events that occurred. This course was able to go in depth about all of the contributing factors to the events that occurred. It gave you the real truth about everything and didn’t leave out even the tiniest details. Before starting the course, I thought I knew a pretty good amount about the Holocaust and World War II. However, I now realize that didn’t know that much information about it at all. This course made me realize that it would take years to learn “a lot” about the topic and that it is impossible to know everything about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Facing History and Ourselves course. This was by far my favorite course that I took this semester and I strongly recommend that anyone who has the opportunity to take this course, that they should. This course was so valuable to me that not only did it teach me many, many facts that I did not know prior to me being in the classroom, but it also taught me how to be a better person. The course was very unique in that it was able to teach people how to better their lives through the information that was being taught. Behind every fact and everything that transpired in the classroom there were always different ways to benefit by what was being taught. What I really appreciated about this course was that it was able to deliver the information in the most powerful and compelling ways possible. I never found myself losing interest in the subject matter or becoming “bored” with what I was learning about. This was the most unique class I had ever taken and I would strongly recommend taking it.

One of the lessons that we did in class that I thought was the most beneficial to me was our unit on World War II. Not only did I think that this was the most interesting unit that we did, but I learned so much about human beings, and what they are capable of doing to one another. The images that I saw during this unit will stay with me for the rest of my life. The countless pictures of the mass graves dug by the Nazis to fill with the hundreds of thousands of dead Jews will stay with me forever. The most influential and beneficial movie to me was “The Grey Zone”. This movie brought you inside Auschwitz; a Nazi concentration camp located in southern Poland that killed over 1.3 million people during World War II. The reason why I liked this movie so much was because of its ability to “grab” the viewer’s attention. This movie was portrayed in such a way that you could not help but feel so sad for the victims and the Sonderkommandos in the crematorium. The scene that sticks with me the most from this movie was when a grandfather working in the crematorium was forced to put three generations of his family into the burners. One thing that I learned while watching this movie was that I didn’t know how much manipulation was occurring while at these “death camps”. The Nazis made the Jewish people feel comfortable by speaking to them in their native languages while they led them to the gas chambers. This “added comfort” made the Jewish people that much more compliant and made it easier to get them into the gas chambers.

One of the most moving films that we watched in class was the segment that brought the viewers inside the death camps after they had been taken over by the Allies. At this point, the death camps had been shut down and all of the Nazis had fled. But what they left behind was truly astonishing. The allies came across barns filled with dead bodies, mass graves, and crematoriums filled with bones and ashes. The allies were shocked when they discovered what the Nazis had done to these people. Of the few survivors that remained, most were severely injured, malnourished or both. Many of the people that were still alive by the time the allies reached the death camps died shortly after. What surprised me about the camps was that the people in the surrounding Polish and German towns didn’t know what was occurring. In the film, the townspeople were shown walking towards the camps smiling and having a good time. When these people were brought to the camps they were astonished that these mass killings had taken place a few miles from the very place that they reside in. They left the camps with much different expressions on their faces from when they arrived. At times I thought it was rather hard to keep watching this film. Many of the photographs or scenes in the film gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It was difficult to keep my eyes on the screen when picture after picture were dead bodies. Many of the surviving prisoners showed the U.S officers how the Nazis tortured and killed them using different techniques and contraptions. The main question that I had after this film was: How could people do this to one another? I honestly don’t understand how people could mistreat and brutally murder one another like this. It made me sick to my stomach to imagine all of the pain and misery all the people in Europe and others involved in the war had to go through, especially the Jews and Gypsies that were unfortunate enough to be in these death camps.

One of the most interesting films that we watched during the course was the movie “Amen!” I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The film takes place in Germany and the main character is an S.S officer who is very high up in the ranks. The officer is appalled at what is happening to the Jews in the camps and about all of the mass killings that are occurring at these death camps. The officer then tries to tell religious officials and other important people around Europe that the Jews are being killed in these gas chambers. The part that I found to be the most interesting is that there were very few people that believed him and that were willing to help his cause. Not even the pope or other very powerful religious officials were willing to help this cause because they did not believe him. When these people eventually found out about these killings, it was too little too late and the war was already almost over. I thought it was unbelievable how not even the pope was able to believe the SS officer’s stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course and thought that it benefited me in many ways. It really opened my eyes up to many ideas and principles that I was unaware of prior to taking the course.

Connor Gibbs' Blog

Friday, January 14, 2011

Introduction

Essay

Works Cited

Wednesday, January 5, 2011