What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
By Sarah Fontaine
One of the semester courses I decided to take this year was Facing History and Ourselves taught by Mr. Gallagher. With the little time I have left in Facing History I can honestly say that this was my favorite class I took out of all four years at Westborough High School. Now, I know that whoever sees this essay is going to say "You are definitely only saying that because you know Mr. Gallagher has to read it and you want a good grade." Well I can assure all of you that that is not the case at all. Facing History has taught me more about myself than any other class I ever took at WHS, and maybe any class I will take in college the next four years. This class is so much more than just to teach the juniors and seniors at our school about the Holocaust in Germany. It is about showing all of us the effects of being a bystander, and just how terrible things can get if we do not to learn to change our ways. Throughout these past couple of months we have watched so many videos and read articles that I don’t think I will ever be able to forget.
One movie we watched in class that really touched me was called The Grey Zone. This movie is based on a true story of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli who was a Hungarian Jewish doctor that was saved and then chosen to be the head pathologist at the camp in Auschwitz. The movie follows the Sonderkommando Jews secret plan to revolt. This movie moved me in two ways. One, it made me happy to know that the people in the camps weren’t just going along with the daily torture and that they actually fought back for themselves and every other Jew forced into a concentration camp even though they knew there was no way they would live afterwards. I am going to be honest, when the workers in the crematorium of the camp threw the Nazi soldier into the fire to be burned alive, I was so happy (I don’t care how terrible that sounds). Another way the movie really moved me was when I got to see the terrible killing of all the Jews that revolted in the camp. The fact that the Nazi soldiers had them all lay face down on the grass while they shot the Jews one by one was terrible. The soldiers wanted them to know it was coming so that the death was even more terrible. The part that really got to me was when the two Jewish men laying down next to each other were talking and realizing that they would have been neighbors and then said a tearful goodbye seconds before one of them was shot. My heart sunk as I watched those few moments unfold. This movie showed me just what it means to stop being a bystander. Even though the Jews knew that revolting was basically a suicide mission they did it because they knew it was the right thing to do in their situation.
The second movie that was meaningful to me in Facing History and Ourselves was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This movie was about a family that moved to a house closer to a concentration camp after the father got a promotion in the Nazi army. The main character in this movie is the eight year old son named Bruno. Bruno, being an innocent kid that does not know any better, refers to the camp as the farm because that is what he thinks it is. After his mother discovers the camp is so close to the house she gives Bruno strict orders to not go in the backyard or go near the "farm", which of course he defies. Every day he runs to the camp and talks to a Jewish boy he befriended through the fence. The movie goes on to show Bruno and the boy to make a plan for Bruno to sneak into the camp so they can play. Bruno ends up being accidently gassed to death with everyone else in the camp. Even though this movie is not based off a true story it still really stuck with me. The fact that Bruno was killed in the camp his father was in charge of was, to me at least, karma at work. People who either do terrible things or watch terrible things happen without doing anything are going to be punished. It could be by a person or just the universe in the form of karma. This movie showed me one of the ways the world got back at these Nazi soldiers and even though I’m sad that little Bruno died, I think it was the only way that his father was going to get just how terrible what he was doing was. Another thing this movie showed with Bruno’s death was that these Jews being killed and tortured were the same as everyone else; they were the same as Bruno. They did not deserve to be treated the way they were, just like Bruno didn’t deserve to die. 
The third film, and the one that upset me the most, was the last one we watched in class. The movie was all of the films the Americans took when we entered the camps for the first time. I have never been disturbed by anything so much in my life. Actually being able to see the terrible condition people were in and the conditions they lived in hurt me. No one deserves to be treated the way the Jews were. They were starved, tortured, and forced to work in the camps just to be killed in the end. I started to actually cry when I saw the piles of dead bodies piled up all over the place. You have to be a terrible person to allow something like that to go on. This film basically solidified the whole class for me. It made the Holocaust real to me. 
Works Cited
Arbeit Macht Frei. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013.Dead Bodies. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Google Images. Image.13 January 2013.
The Grey Zone. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013.
The Victims. Google Images. Image. 13 January 2013.
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