If I had been there...

This blog is a student sample for my eighth grade class' unit on the Holocaust.

I can't imagine what life would have been like living in the Holocaust. To have been put through that much pain and suffering is unimaginable. In this blog I'd like to share more of my feelings about what it would have been like to live through the Holocaust and to have been an outsider looking in (like I am now).

The victims of the Holocaust went through so much pain and suffering during Hitler's rule. First, all of their material possessions were taken away and they were told that they were the reason Germany was struggling. To be ridiculed like that must have been horrible. It hurts me to have people laugh at the stupid things I do, so it would be a million times worse if I had to go through what the victims went through. Then to be loaded into cattle cars and taken to concentration camps, they were treated like they weren’t even human. No one ever deserves to be treated like that. To have their family taken from them, forced to work nearly to death (if they were lucky), and then killed if they no longer served a “purpose.” This has to be one of the darkest parts of our history.

To be a soldier looking in on the holocaust must have been like peering into another world. Only this world makes your stomach turn because instead of people staring back at you, their are skeletons. And it hurts so much, because you know that you can't give them all the food you have, because it will only make them feel worse. However, knowing that I had helped to liberate these people and give them the freedom they deserved would be a great honor. To know that I helped to save their lives, it would be life-changing. Just learning about what happened in the Holocaust has made me promise to never let it happen again, so I can only imagine how it made a liberator feel.

This unit has given me so much respect for the victims of the Holocaust.