About Facing History                                                                        

About three fourths of the way through my junior year of high school I felt that, because I am Jewish and the high school offers a course about the events of the holocaust, it would be a good idea to take the facing history course.  It especially felt like the right thing to do since family on my Russian- Jewish side had to experience the holocaust as well as the Russian pogroms.  Going into the class with these two points in mind made me ready to experience the events through movies, primary documents, and pictures.  The end goal for me leaving the class was to not just be another uninformed and ignorant member of society which I feel has been achieved over the half year.

Before taking the course the holocaust and genocide in general seemed like a very distant topic even though it happens through the world in past, present, and most likely future.  This is one of the unfortunate side effects of living in a very “politically correct” suburban town with a fairly small Jewish community.  However, this distant feeling started to change throughout the course.  Movies like “Freedom Writers” made the topic of hardships, struggles, pain, and fear more relatable because it was in a school environment which is something I, and other students, recognize as being place of drama and social warfare.  On the other hand Freedom Writers did not have the same emotional impact that future segments had, but definitely gave me a new prospective.  “The Longest Hatred” film that followed Freedom Writers elicit the first strongly negative emotional response of disgust and to be honest anger, because it angers me that people could get away with treating fellow human beings so badly.  Another thing that I found was that even though movies like Swing Kids and The Pianist are more entertaining than documentaries, due to the fact that they are plot driven, they do not have anywhere near as powerful an impact as the documentaries and do not give rise to as many questions.  One exception to that rule was the movie “The Grey Zone.”  It is one of those weird feelings, but whenever I see the actual gas chambers and the ash from the crematorium I get this pit in my stomach almost like I feel like I am going to be sick.  I can’t be one hundred percent sure of why but a reasonable guess would be that it just seems so surreal that these evens did happen in the not so distant past.  In fact some of the people that took part in the events of the holocaust are still alive and in some cases walking the streets freely which to me is unacceptable.  Other activities in class like class discussions also provided a good dynamic to the movies because, and I don’t know about anyone else, but they can get a bit heavy and difficult to watch.  Discussions about the “Milgram Experiment” were quite interesting since it truly shows how easy it is to influence people when told by an authority figure especially if the one being told is just a child like the children in the Hitler Youth.  This also brings up another goal of the course which is to not give into social pressures of a crowd just because it is the so called “popular” thing to do.  In addition specifically pertaining to the Milgram Experiment is the logical fallacy of appealing to authority which is when one seeks to persuade people not by giving an argument or evidence, but by appealing to the respect people have for that person.  With all this in mind it made bringing up class discussions about current events, social, political, and economic issues much more respectful and mature which is refreshing these days.  Especially since most people even United States Congressmen and women can’t even do that.  One of the more memorable class discussions was about gun laws in the United States in the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting.

Moving onto what sections or lessons were the most meaningful to me is somewhat brief and is absolutely specific to one topic.  This topic being the actual acts of genocide during the holocaust, be it indiscriminate executions of Jewish men, women, and children, the gassing of prisoners at concentration camps and death camps, burning of bodies, and the list goes on of all the Nazi’s war crimes.  My reasoning for this being the most meaningful topic was that evoked the most anger from me which does not usually happen when I am watching something on a screen and also does not directly impact me.  Some of these included the movies “Road to Treblinka”, “The Gestapo”, and all of the BBC documentaries.  What I found to be the most meaningful of all even more than these three documentaries was when the class was able to see photos taken by the SS of the death camps.  They sent a shiver down my spine whenever I saw the actual victims of the holocaust, even children, being marched off to the gas chambers as well as seeing the inside of the gas chamber which also gave off its own ominous and very creepy vibe even though it looked just like a shower at an overnight camp.  It was also very infuriating to see the SS soldiers and their wives or girlfriends laughing and having just a hell of a time like everything fine and dandy, meanwhile they are robotically killing an entire race of people.  And same goes for the people that live in the houses that over look or just in viewing distance of the camp.  The lesson that I felt went parallel with the album of pictures was about all of the medical experiments the Nazis conducted on the Jews, Gypsies, and prisoners of war (mainly Russians).

After a constant stream of these frankly depressing to watch movies, it changes a person, at least it did for me, in a way that should make one more compassionate toward their fellow human beings.

As a side note personally I feel that a key role to this course is a teacher that has a fiery passion for the subject that they are teaching, which Mr. Gallagher fills flawlessly.  After all how could a student be expected to become passionate about a subject if the teacher is not passionate about it?