blog post #5 - Malaysia

Reading Night and going to the Holocaust museum changed my perspective of how extreme it all was. I knew that the Germans were cruel to the Jews, and I knew that Jews were put into concentration camps, but I didn't know much about the conditions inside the camps, and I didn't know that families were separated and that Jews had numbers tattooed on their arms. Just by reading Night I learned a lot about the Holocaust and what it was like to be in a concentration camp. When we went to the museum, there was one part where you could look down into a well and it was a slideshow showing the cruel experiments Germans used Jews for. It was also very interesting to hear survivors stories because hearing the story from a person, face to face, in some ways changes how I interpret what I hear. After learning more about what happened during the Holocaust and thinking about why and how it happened I will see our history in a different way. I know that in our history we've made plenty of mistakes, but a genocide, like this, is much different than something like slavery. Both are bad mistakes that we made, but unlike slavery, there are still some genocides happening today. I've heard many people say"if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it" the Holocaust proves that, because even though the genocides happening today are for different reasons, we still haven't fully learned that it's wrong to commit a mass murder of one kind of people because they may not be exactly the same as you, or may not have the same opinions or ideas as you. Once we fully understand that every person really is equal, I believe we will have finally learned from our past mistakes and we will finally be able to say we've put in the effort to prevent future generations from making the same mistakes we have. I believe that by having future generations learn about our past mistakes will also help to prevent them from making our same mistakes, because by learning about things like the holocaust and slavery, it really changes your perspective of humanity, and it really makes you think about what the circumstances must've been for that to have happened, and it makes you appreciate the world we live in now so much more.