A Wrap Up About Learning About the Holocaust in Public School

For the last few day I've been blogging about learning about the Holocaust in Public School. It's been an interesting experience. I've argued with my teacher, I've contributed a lot to class, and now the unit is over, we learned about the Holocaust for 5 days. And not even for the whole hour. I have to say I'm disappointed and worried for the future. Today we have survivors to come in and speak every now and then but in 20 years we wont. We wont have people to tell the story's from first hand experience. We'll only have books and recorded videos of survivors story's. So I urge you, my readers to educate yourself about the Holocaust, and teach people. Because frankly, some people know absolutely nothing about it.

Learning about the Holocaust in Public School Day 3

Today we turned in our pink packets that were homework over the weekend. From there we started a discussion, I would like to highlight two things we talked about:

1. There are other Genocides happening in Africa now for example Darfur there are 100,000's of Innocent civilians being mass murdered. Yes, that's not even close to the 6 million plus Jews that perished in the Holocaust. I asked my teacher why the mighty United States who must go to countries all over the world to police wars is not doing anything to stop the Genocides in Africa. My teacher explained; that yes whats happening in Africa is a genocide absolutely, but governments officials who are part of the UN cannot call it a Genocide because if they did awarding to the papers they have signed have an obligation to go in there and take care of it.

Learning about the Holocaust in Public School Day 2

On Friday my World History class continued our unit on the Holocaust. We started off by talking about our homework packets. That took about 10-15 minutes. Our packet was something to do with China, or maybe Japan, I can't really remember what.

Next we watched a movie/documentary on a Holocaust survivors life. I found this very annoying because a lot of kids were not watching the video just like during any other unit. The problem? Learning about the Holocaust is not the same as learning about any other history unit, it gets people emotional, and is very important to learn about to ensure it never happens again. My teacher is teaching this unit just like any other unit except its not.

Learning about the Holocaust in Public School Day 1

My world history class just had a test on World War one last week. Monday we started learning about the after effects of World War 1, and today/yesterday we have started learning about what led up to World War 2, what Fascism is, how Hitler got power and how Germany began the war. Some of it is actually new to me. I mean I know all about the Holocaust, I've read tons of books, we learn about it every year in Hebrew school, and we've learned about it in school in past years; but still I mean I knew he slowly started making anti Semitic laws, but I never knew how blindlessly Britain and France acted. Germany broke the treaty of Versailles tons of times before Britain and France did anything. The Czechs just surrounded pretty much, and Britain and France didn't come to any countries aid until Germany attacked Poland, oh and Poland fell very quickly, because Germany had the Soviets helping them.