Reflection:

During the Holocaust human rights were completely disregarded. With the ghettos, concentration and death camps, people were killed or put into dreadful living conditions. I don’t think that it is right that the Nazi’s weren’t all killed for taking so many innocent lives. I learned a lot of things that I previously hadn’t known especially when I was reading Night by Elie Wiesel and watching the film the Nuremburg Trials. All in all, I think that the Holocaust was a terrible event that should have never occurred.

First of all, the people were stripped of their rights when they were brought into the ghettos. The Nazi’s restarted the use of the ghettos in Europe before the start of World War II. The ghettos consisted of very small areas were thousands of the “minorities” were packed together. The largest ghetto in Europe was the Warsaw Ghetto. There were about 450,000 people forced to live here. This ghetto was known for starving its inhabitants as well as carrying many diseases. By the time this ghetto was shut down its population is said to have decreased to about 70,000. These ghettos should not have even been in place. How could the Nazi’s start such a terrible thing?

Later on, The Jews and other minorities were sent to concentration camps were they were forced into even worse situations than in the ghettos. In these camps millions of people died. I think that it’s such a terrible thing that not only were they forced out of their homes to live in the ghettos but they were then taken from there into the concentration camps. It’s not right to do such terrible thing for anyone.

I learned a lot from reading the book Night. Like when they described the little children being thrown into the fires that is a scene that will forever be engraved into my mind. For someone to brutally kill such little kids and babies in that manor is truly sickening. Also in the beginning of the novel when Moshe the Beadle described how the Jews were taken away and slaughtered to be buried in the graves they had dug for themselves. And how he described how babies were thrown into the air to be shot like targets for machine gunners. It was so horrible to read but written in such away that I couldn’t stop. I think that this book taught me a lot about the brutality that took place during the Holocaust. In class when we watched the movie Nuremburg Trials I couldn’t believe some of the things that the Nazi prisoners said in their defense. They all seemed to think what they did was right because they were only following orders. These orders that they followed killed eleven million people so how could that have not realized what they were doing was wrong?

Learning about the Holocaust, if anything, was a real eye opening experience. While I always heard that it was a terrible thing I never really processed just how many people were affected by it. I also learned that it wasn’t just the Jewish population that was sent into such horrible conditions but it was other people as well like the Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, gypsies and so many more. These people never did anything wrong but were blamed for the loss in a war and so much more.

- Kelsey Morse pd. 3