When we started talking about the Holocaust I was all like "Wahoo! This is something I know about." But as we got further and further into it I realized all the small details that I had not quite heard about. Like, how many people were killed in the extermination camps, the 11 million people and only a little more than half were Jews. I had thought that it only focused on Hitler, the Nazis and the Jews but there were other groups in the mix and it included all of Europe.
Humanism is the idea that all individuals matter and the Holocaust completely opposed this idea. The holocaust stripped Jews of their rights. They were killed just because they practiced a different religion and Hitler didn’t like or trust them. A couple things I found very disturbing were using babies as machine gun targets, burning people alive, and the fact that after being beaten so many times and pretty much starved to the point were you could see every bone clearly, if they didn't die, they were still walking and talking.
I don't think that anyone could ever imagine the pain that they went through and all the suffering they went through. To be separated from your family and then treated so bad you had to be sick in the head to be able to do something like that to another human being. We were all created equal with different qualities, with different beliefs, and different characteristics and that doesn't give anyone the right to disrespect someone like the way the Jews, the gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled and the Jehovah's witnesses were disrespected.
I think that the Universal declaration of human rights was issued too late but now it still needs to be reinforced. Genocides still occur today. There are people who still get killed and tortured in the thousands everyday.
I also think that Hitler needed to be extremely messed up to let something like that happen. I feel extreme sorrow for the millions of people killed and the thousands who survived with the nightmares of years past. I don't think the Holocaust was justified and I don't think it will ever be.
- Ally