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by Turckle

Created on: December 16, 2009   Last Updated: December 20, 2009

Being a student myself and having learned about the Holocaust, I can tell you that from my own experiences that the Holocaust is emphasized much more than Hitler. Hitler, we were taught, was brilliant. A charismatic genius who could rise up to lead the war torn nation of Germany to supremacy. He was brilliant; when the German flocks listened to him speak, they stood and cheered, no matter what he said. Looking back at Germany after World War 1, we were told to imagine how those Germans felt, alone, embarrassed, angry. So Hitler in his sadistic brilliance composed a plan to catapult him to power while restoring the moral of the German people. His plant was fiendishly simple, blame everything on a scapegoat. The people of Germany were leaderless, angry, and confused, so when Hitler came preaching his message that no, it was not the Germans' fault that they had lost World War 1 but rather the fault of the Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and other ethnic minorities, the German people, hungry for retribution, bit onto his bait and thus started one of the darkest periods ih history. From there, the people of Germany began to terrorize those minorities first by shutting them up in ghettos and then by shipping them off to concentration and death camps. Hitler was not the full tree of genocide, but he had planted the seed. 

From there, we focused on the Holocaust itself. We experienced this event by reading Night by Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor. In no place in his book does Elie smear Hitler and this rubbed off on us. We realized that while Hitler instigated the discrimination, it was the German people, hungry for revenge, who had blown the whole issue out of proportion. Hitler himself did not order death marches or crimes against Jews. We went on to read the whole book through and through and see how horrendous this event was. Sometimes we did laugh at the irony or images portrayed in the book, but behind our quiet chuckles, each one of us could feel the heavy burden and sadness that this past history instilled on us.

What perhaps really cemented these experiences was our visit to the Holocaust Museum (notice that it is not the Hitler Museum). There we stood in the cattle cars where hundreds of Jews were packed in to be transported to camps and for the first time felt the fear, anger, confusion, that the Holocaust victims felt. We witnessed the medical experiments that German physicians had performed on prisoners, the ovens where victims were burned alive, and the showers where Holocaust victims were gassed. None of these really made me feel connected to the event and the people. They made me feel depressed and truly sad, but not connected. However, then I entered a room. This room was full of worn out shoes and sandals ranging from a baby's to a very tall man's. There were tens of thousands of shoes in there and each pair belonged to a Holocaust victim. This finally made me feel connected, this finally stopped by breath, and this finally made my eyes water. To know that each of those shoes belonged to someone, a real person, not juts a fictitious personality, made the Holocaust seem so much more real. Each of those shoes had a story to tell and that story was so much more than the Holocaust.

I forgot about Hitler at this point and my anger was more directed to the weak doctors and concentration camp managers who had swayed under Hitler's words and committed acts which their very own conscience probably rejected. Throughout my academic experiences there was nothing quite like learning about the Holocaust. Germany was a dried out pile of wood and brush and Hitler needed only a spark to set of the fire that would rage to consume the morality and trust of a nation.

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