What Facing History and Ourselves Meant To Me

Facing History and Ourselves is easily the most enlightening and most powerful class I have ever taken in my life. It destroys the illusion many of us see that the past is the past and events that already happened that people aren’t proud about will never happen again. The light bulb didn’t go off in my head until pretty late in the course. It turned on when I was staring at a picture in my hands. The smiling faces, laughs, and pride that I saw present in the picture was frightening to me. I scanned the picture, and realized that I was looking at people my age. The Nazi’s in the picture could very well have been my class mates dressed up as Nazi’s and that’s when I realized something: Facing History and Ourselves means just that, Facing History and Ourselves. Looking into the eyes of the evil killers of the Nazi party, I thought, “Had I lived during this period, would this be a picture of me?” This question forced me for the first time to face myself, and my morals, and what deep down inside I am really about. What if I had lived in the U.S. a few decades earlier, and I found myself in the middle of the Jim Crowe era. Would I be ignorant? Would I be racist and discriminate against the blacks? Or would I be on the other side? I am glad that in my lifetime that I have never had to find out which type of person I would be. However, after taking this course, I now know that I would in the blink of an eye be shot down next to a Jew during the holocaust, rather than be the person pulling the trigger. Looking into myself I don’t know what type of person I would have been had I not taken this course. If I were still ignorant there’s a good chance that maybe I would be like one of the people in the photograph we saw. This class has changed me as a student for the rest of my life. Facing History and Ourselves is the most unique course I have ever taken. Never before in my life had I seen history in the way that this class shown it. It is very interesting to see history. Not learn it by being lectured, but to actually see what happened. One lesson in particular was very fascinating. Seeing actual footage of the death camps taught me about the Third Reich in a way none of the books I have ever read about Nazi Germany. Its one thing to read about the horrors, but to see them visually puts a whole new perspective on history itself. Seeing the footage shot by the Allies as they liberated the death camps was an eye opening and life changing experience. Seeing proof of the death camp and the unimaginable atrocities committed by the Nazi’s was vital to me, because it was so hard for me to believe it actually happened. As I sat in class watching the footage, in some ways it was good closure for me. To see the camps as they actually were when they were liberated has a deeper level of meaning than most other things that we have seen or done in class. Due to the reality of the film, knowing that what is being shown is the actual death camps used by the Nazi’s to kill millions of Jews helped to solidify in my mind the image of what a death camp really is. Although it was a form of closure, seeing the footage left just as many questions as it had answered. How could one group of people do such a thing to another? The most important facet of the course to me was the structure of the course itself. I thought it was very important that we studied three different time periods of social persecution. This is because it shows us that racism and extreme persecution are not isolated events in history. It happens every where and all the time and every corner of the world has at some point seen some type of persecution. Even though one might not instantly group the Jim Crowe era to the holocaust, I think that studying the Jim Crowe era is very important to Facing History and Ourselves. If we studied the holocaust, studied the Armenian Genocide, and studied another genocide, such as the genocide in Rwanda, racism and persecution would seem like a foreign issue. However, we know this is not the case. Studying a persecution that took place in our very country, and in our very state really hit home that racism and hate are not foreign evils, but one that take place in our country every day. It was also important to study more than one topic because it shows one very important thing, all different types of people have been persecuted over the years. After so many groups have been killed and targeted, it’s impossible for me to understand how this keeps on happening. This course has changed me as a person in this way. It caused me to start looking around at what’s happening. As I look at the world around me, and at its people, I see things in a very different way. Its interesting to look at the people around the world and think that one day the people I’m looking at might be not too far from the Nazi’s, persecuting a certain group of people. It also changes the way I think about the people around me. It makes me aware that the group of people that make up our country could very well persecute other people of this country, and I think like this because that’s exactly what the Nazi’s were. An advanced culture and group of people that became cold blooded killers and it scares me that there are similarities between ourselves and pre Nazi Germany. I have learned so many things from Facing History and Ourselves over this semester, its made me a better student, and most of all this class has made me a much better person.