Make A Difference Essay

What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me

This course benefitted me in numerous ways as both a person, and as a student and I am very lucky that I had the opportunity to take this class. As a person it made me realize how important it is to stand up for what I believe in. I have always been told that standing up for what is right is very important, but this class made me realize how important it is, and how one person can truly make a difference. Going into this course I knew it was important to stand up for what you believe in, but I didn’t think it was a big deal if you didn’t, and now looking back on it I have been in situations where I wish I stood up for myself. This course made me a stronger person and though sometimes the movies were hard to watch, it taught me more than just about the Holocaust; this course taught me about life. It proved to me that one person can make a difference. It showed me that standing up for what I believe in can change someone’s life or even save someone’s life. After taking this course I am now a person who will stand up for what I believe in and I will now step in and say something when I see something that I don’t like, because I now realize how important that is. This course benefitted me as a student because it taught me a lot of things I didn’t know about the Holocaust, and not only that but these new things I learned were related to real life situations that could happen to me. I knew the Holocaust existed, but this course showed me how bad and went into such detail about it that now I would truly take offense if someone said they believed the Holocaust never happened. I learned that history can relate to situations that I am in everyday. I also now know exactly how to write an outline, and how to format a works cited page, and make a cover page and I am thankful for that because I will use this in college. Mr. Gallagher’s stories about his own personal life, the films he showed us, and the discussions we had are very memorable and I hope to always remember them.

One of the three facets of the course that was the most meaningful to me was the movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” All of the movies that we watched affected me in many ways, but watching this one was the hardest. The part in the movie when the little boy went to the “other side,” Auschwitz, to help Schmuel find his father was the saddest part of the movie. The boy’s innocence and his want to just help his friend made this scene very emotional. His lack of knowledge of what was going on showed how well his father and mother hid the truth from him. He lived so close to the camps, but his mother did everything she could to keep him out of the backyard and prevent him for learning what was happening just a few miles away. This movie was incredible and very realistic and the part that made me the most emotional was at the end and when he gave his friend, Schmuel, some food and the soldier yelled at him asking if he had given the food to the “Jew.” When Bruno answered “no, I have never seen that kid before in my life,” my heart broke. It made me realize how easy it was to corrupt children to believe the “Jewish people were bad” because they didn’t understand what to believe and Bruno was put in a situation where he didn’t know what to do. The ending of this film really exemplified why the parents shouldn’t have kept what was going in the outside world from their son. He died because he was trying to help a friend, while his father lived who killed millions of people, it just doesn’t seem fair. Throughout the rest of the day I was upset. I cried while watching the end of the movie and when I got home told my parents all about it. The next weekend we watched it together because I told them it was a must-see movie and would really make them put things in their own life into consideration and show them how bad the conditions in the concentration camps really were. It was hard to watch the entire film, but I am very glad that I saw this movie and I will remember it forever.

One of the other facets of the course that was very meaningful to me was when we got to see the “Auschwitz Album.” I felt so lucky to be one of the view people in this world who got to look at these photographs. They were hard to look at because of how skinny the Jewish people looked, and how happy the Nazi’s and the other German people were. They were also very sad to look at because there were children in many of them walking to the gas chambers, not knowing that they only have a few more hours to live. In one of the photographs there were dozens of men in their “bunks” all packed together and it was sad to see how unhealthy they looked, how little space they got, and how horrible the conditions were. The photographs also made me realize how many people were in Auschwitz and how many of them died. The huge pile of shoes that people were sorting through proved how many people were sent to work in the concentration camps. The picture where the bodies were piled on top of one another was very disturbing to look at, and showed how they treated these people even after they were dead. The Nazi’s could walk by the pile of dead bodies everyday and not be affected by it at all; this is what I found to be disturbing. All of these pictures really proved that the Holocaust was an awful event that happened, and I think if anybody saw these pictures today they would think they are unbelievable.

The last facet in the course that was the most meaningful to me was the discussion we had about bystanders. We talked about how important it is to really stand up for what you believe in and talked about how it is true that one person can truly make a difference and that was proven in some of the films that we watched during this course. This discussion made me put my life into perspective and made me think about who I am today and who I want to be in the future. It made me realize that even though I am one small person in this gigantic world that I can make a difference just by voicing my opinion or standing up for what I believe in. We mentioned that if the Nazi’s stood up for what they truly believed in then the tragic events that took place in the Holocaust could have been avoided. Back then, if people stood up for what they believed in they could save millions of lives. In this discussion we touched upon bullying and even if you see someone doing something that you don’t like to someone else, how important it is to voice your opinion and say that’s wrong. This course had so many films, discussions, blogs that will change my life forever.