Intro

            My name is Kevin Van Dam, and I am a senior at Westborough High School. This year, I took part in a course called Facing History and Ourselves. The course looks at the history of the holocaust and Nazi Germany, and puts the students in the shoes of the German people at the time and asks them “What would you have done?” We watch historical fictions set in Nazi Germany, as well as documentaries on the holocaust, and other documentaries relating to human nature to see if there was in fact any truth to the Nazi slogan “we were just following orders”. It is a very meaningful course taught by a man who loves his job and his students and wants them to know who they are and what they would have done. I took this course because everybody in the past who had taken it has absolutely loved it. I haven’t talked to one person who didn’t absolutely love this course, and now I understand why. I never thought that a class could open my eyes as much as this course did. I now have a better understanding of who I am as a person. I know how I can make a difference and I know that good can always triumph over evil. This course put life into the holocaust to me and I have a greater understanding of quite possibly the worst event in human history, and a much greater appreciation for the plight of the Jewish population.

What Facing History Meant to me

            Facing History and Ourselves changed the way I looked at our history and myself as an individual. From a young age, we are all exposed to the horrors of humanity; I was six years old when the twin towers fell. I was first taught about Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust when I was in fifth grade, but I never truly understood the scope of his crimes. Before this course, the holocaust was just an event in mankind’s past. I’d hear about the millions of men women and children Hitler and his men murdered, I’d see the memorials, but I’d never understand what had happened. I don’t think anybody can truly understand the holocaust. But after this course, I look at the event, and humanity in general, through an entirely different light. I now understand that the German population had ample opportunity to stop Hitler, I learned that civilians did nothing to stop the slaughter of Jews, and I learned that the only way for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. Thanks to this course, I now know that in order to truly make a difference, I need to know who I am, and I need to be able to maintain my identity no matter how the world around me changes.

            The course began with finding out who we are, and discovering how easily it is to lose our identity because of our peers and superiors. The first work we read was The Bear that Wasn’t, the story of a bear that wakes up in a factory and is told by everybody that he is “just a silly man who needs a shave ad wears a fur coat”. He is told so many ties that he thinks they must be right and starts to live as a human, but then he realizes his true identity and hibernates happily as the bear he knows he is.  This book was the most meaningful work we looked at throughout the course. Throughout my high school career, I constantly changed my personality depending on who I was around to the point where I forgot who the real me was. Without getting into too much detail, this behavior caught up to me this summer and I was put into a position where I had to remember who I was, and I had to make myself happy. During the reading of this book, I became teary-eyed because I could relate to the bear. I was constantly changing my personality for those around me, and I knew I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t truly happy until I was Kevin Van Dam in my own eyes once again.

            After our work with realizing our identities, we moved on to the study of the holocaust. Studying such a horrible event was painful at times. Seeing the way the Nazis treated Jews made me sick at times. “The Grey Zone” was an especially gruesome revelation in my study of the holocaust. The reason this movie was so hard to watch was that the Nazis made the Jews do their dirty work at the extermination camps. They employed sonderkommandos, groups of Jewish prisoners, to kill, clean, and dispose of the prisoners in the camp. The Nazis weren’t only some of the worst people to ever walk the Earth, but they were also complete cowards. They turned innocent men women and children against each other for their own sick, twisted pleasure. They had absolutely no regard for human life, and they would turn on their own mother if Der Fuher told them too. Had it not been for this course, I would be ignorant of the horrifying nature of the Nazis. I wouldn’t have truly known how awful men can become, and how necessary it is to stop them.

            The course’s lessons all come full circle when we were faced with the question of what we would do if we were in the shoes of a German or Polish citizen during the holocaust. In movies like “The Pianist”, and “Nazis: A Warning from History”, it became clear how passive many civilians were during Hitler’s reign of terror. We saw images of Polish businessmen walking by corpses in the Warsaw ghetto as if nothing were happening. We saw interviews with people who turned their Jewish neighbors over to the SS, and never saw them again. We saw Hitler’s initial rise to power and the role that civilians played in his regime. The Nazis took all originality from the German people. They either thought one way, or they were killed. It is this masking of identity that can lead to people like Hitler seizing control and doing the horrible things he did. People need to stand up for what they believe in and stop evil from grabbing the reigns of society. Had Hitler not received the help he did from the passive German population, he most certainly would have failed. Thanks to this course, I know that in order to stop evil, even the slightest resistance can do the greatest good. It is up to us to stick to our roots and not let society corrupt us.

            The biggest lesson I got out of this course was the power of the individual. We all have an outstanding potential to change the course of history, and it is up to the individual to keep that course from evil. Had more people in Germany stood up to the initial rise of Nazism, had Americans opened up their doors for Jewish immigration, had fewer people turned over their neighbors to the SS, there would be no need for this course. The holocaust is a scar on the face of humanity that was carved by the knife of evil, but it easily could have been stopped. The Nazis knew the power of the individual, and made damn sure that everybody was the same to keep the individual from throwing their plans off track. I learned that if I stick to my guns and do what I think is right, I will be happy.

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Works Cited

The Bear That Wasn’t. Google images.  Image. 25 June 2006. 

Sonderkommando of Auschwitz. Google images.  Image. 25 June 2006. 

The Pianist. Google images.  Image. 25 June 2006. 

Nazi Rally at Nuremburg. Google images.  Image. 25 June 2006. 

The Grey Zone. Google images.  Image. 25 June 2006.