One Survivor Remembers

1)   For me the images that were the most powerful were the pictures of the mass graves. They were the most powerful to me because when I looked at those pictures it made me think that this had happened hundreds of times during the war and all of the people that were killed. I think that they put these pictures in then beginning of the film to show what the film is talking about and that this happened to the families of the people in the movie.

2)   The Nazis dehumanized Jews by separating them from their families. They would take them away from them to make the Jews feel like they were alone and to make them even more sad. Gerda overcame this by keeping hope and through her friends. She stayed with them and they were able to stay alive and make important decisions in their lives.

3)   Some of the things that I would miss if they were taken away from me would be my pets and some simple things like my house. One thing that I think I take for granted would be the lifestyle that I have. I live better than the people who were taken by the Holocaust. I think that I would miss my way of life a lot if it was taken away from me.

4)   We like to say that these were such horrible times but it wasn’t that long ago and there are still people who do these things today. Many people are still racist, and there are still hate groups. I think that the only way to fight these groups is to protect the people who they want to hurt and to fight back by letting them realize that acting like this will never get them anywhere.

5)   I think that the heroes of this film are Gerda and her friends, but also the women who saved her life in the labor camp. I think that Gerda was very strong because she was able to remain hopeful during this, but the women who saved her went against what others thought of her and helped the girls. I think that we can make the world better by learning about this and making sure that nothing even slightly similar to this ever happens again.

Emil and Karl #3

I am reading a book called Emil and Karl. In this book it is very like what I have read in articles about the Holocaust. In the book Emil and Karl are orphaned by the Nazis and have nowhere to go. This is like an article that I read about how during the Holocaust 1.5 million kids were killed and many were left without parents. In the book they are both doing what children their age would do; be put to forced labor. The main children that they targeted were Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) children, but they also targeted many other children. They wanted to create what they thought to be a perfect world so they went to child institutions where the kids had physical and mental disabilities. They would go to these places and they would either take these children or eliminate them on the spot.

In Emil and Karl they both are temporarily taken in by a women and man who work in Karl’s old building. This is like in the article I read where a man named Janusz Korczak who was an orphanage director who refused to leave the kids and died as a result. He is also in the other book that I read Milkweed. He helps out the protagonist in that book named Misha, and the last time Misha sees him he is being led onto a Nazi train with the orphans. The article it talks about how that many kids died from starvation and that probably would have happened to Emil and Karl if the people in the book didn’t help them. The man who took them in went into a rage about the Nazis when he heard about what happened to the boys and when they came back a few hours later he was taken by the Nazis, leaving his wife with Emil and Karl. This shows how quickly word spread and how many people supported the Nazis. In another article that I briefly looked through it said that Vienna, the city that they are in makes up twenty eight percent of Austria’s population at the time. It also said that one hundred sixty thousand Jews lived in this town.

In the article that I read they speak of Kinder transports. Where people would take children from Nazi run towns away on trains. It makes me wonder if this will happen to Emil and Karl. I wonder if they will ever see their parents like so many children didn’t get to do. I also wonder if Nazis will take them away. In the article it talks about how hundreds of children were kidnapped and taken away so they can be used in the way that they saw fit. I want to know how much like the research I have done their lives will be like, and how many of the statistics of this horror they will act in.

National Holocaust Museum