Juan Pablo Sáenz Otero
English
2/06/15
8B
Retelling the Holocaust
Performance Task
The Holocaust was a terribly impressive event in the 20th century. It started evolving between 1933 and 1945. It all began with discrimination towards the Jews. They were separated from their homes and basically persecuted. They were all treated as if they weren’t human beings. During the World War II, the Nazis wanted and had planned to murder and get rid of the entire Jewish population in Europe. By May of 1945, about six million jews were killed. Aside from this, there were also many other people that were victims of the Nazis. These included Roma, those with mental or physical disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, trade unionists, political opponents, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. The Gestapo was the secret police of Nazis. It was also their main tool of destruction. It later played a very important role in helping accomplish the Nazi’s “Final Solution”, which was to get rid of all Jews in Europe. In 1939, the Germans created the Stutthof camp in the west of Stutthof, which was a town 22 miles east of Danzig. The land of the camp was very wet and almost at sea level. About 100,000 people were deported to this camp. Non-Jewish Poles were the main prisoners, but there were also Polish Jews from Warsaw and Bialystok, and Jews from forced-labor camps as well.
Miriam Farkas Ingber was one of the victims of the Holocaust. She, along with her mother, were deported to the Auschwitz camp in 1944. After about three months, they were sent to the Stutthof camp. Miriam told her story to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in a 1990 interview. She starts the interview by telling how during her experience in the camps, one night a girl in her barrack that apparently had epilepsy, had a seizure. Miriam told that the girl had thrown herself down to the floor, and it got such a panic inside that they had thought, then they had came in to kill them. She explains that there was yelling and screaming in the dark, and then the Gestapo had came in, put on the lights on, and started shooting on everybody. Miriam also tells how “he” punished them. She tells how they made them jump out the window, jump in the window, jump out the window, jump in the window. She then told her mother that she couldn’t go on like that, that she was gonna kill herself, how she was going to touch the wires and kill herself because she couldn’t take it anymore. Her mother then told her to wait, and that she believed that they were gonna be saved and that they were gonna survive. Miriam said it had been the most horrible night someone ever can imagine in their life. She then tells how the next day she tried to commit suicide. She says she went next to the wires, and Gestapo, this SS arrived and saw her, grabbed her, and tortured her laying down in a chair 25 times.
The essential message of this experience, is to understand how actually thousands of people had to go through some really tough times. Also, that we must respect their stories, just like we have to put ourselves in their shoes to try to understand their pain, and to acknowledge that many people were killed in those times. Aside from this, we can analyze that era and realize how much we’ve socially and politically evolved as a society, and how we’ve also evolved as human beings who need to respect, tolerate and understand others’ differences, as in their religion, their way of thinking, their mental or physical problems and their sexuality. We can significantly notice how our society has morally grown a lot since the Holocaust. In another hand, we can see how all those people who survived that horrible time, can help us comprehend that era in a better way, putting in our minds an image of how it should've been, and how it was a very important event in History. The survivors and their past experiences, help us guide us to picture the past through their stories and memories.
In conclusion, it’s important to have knowledge of the Holocaust, to be able to think how society was back then, and how dark those times were for thousands of people. We need to apprehend the reality of the Holocaust and how the Nazis wanted and had planned to murder and get rid of the entire Jewish population in Europe. It’s impressive and sad to see that about six million jews were killed. We should also respect all the victims that died, just like all the survivors like Miriam Farkas Ingber, that suffered a lot and will never forget those horrifying times. Their stories and experiences are some of the essential things we have left from that unique event, in which lots of people had to see their friends and family being killed, enslaved or imprisoned. Aside from this, even if we can obviously see how our society has changed a lot regarding discrimination, we are still not perfect. Society needs to evolve even more, because there’s still a lot of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and a great amount of intolerance and judgment towards people. We’ve changed, but we still need to evolve.
Sources of Information:
"Oral History." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, n.d. Web. 04 June 2015.
"Stutthof." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 20 June 2014. Web. 05 June 2015.
"Nazi Perpetrators: The Gestapo." Jewish Virtual Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 June 2015.
"What Was the Holocaust?" The Holocaust Explained. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 June 2015.
