Paige Berrier!

Professor Wertz-Orbaugh!
UWRT-1102!
August 28, 2015!
My Holocaust Education !
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I started learning about the Holocaust when I was in sixth grade. I was immediately in-

terested in the topic. We were supposed to read a book that was more related to the life inside
of the concentration camps. I chose the book Surviving Hitler. It is still one of my favorite books
about the Holocaust even though I have read many more now. After we read the book our
teacher wanted us to understand what the Holocaust was like. One day at school we had the
option to were a Jewish star around school and only eat a small meal that day. Our teacher told
the other 6th graders to ignore the ones wearing the stars. It was an experience that I will always remember and it made me have a personal connection with the topic. It does not seem
like much, but at the time being so young and doing that was different. !
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Once I had learned about the Holocaust I started to do studying on my own. During the

next two years of school it was not a topic that we learned much about. I watched different documentaries and read some books and articles that could broaden my education about the Holocaust. When I started high school, freshman year, I started to learn about it again from a teachers guidance. I took a world history class and we spent a lot of the class talking about World
War II. After I started to learn about the war I gained interest in that as well. The entire topic in
general was just really interesting to me. During that class we spent around 2 weeks talking
about World War II and around a week on the Holocaust. During that time he broke down what a
daily day would be like for a prisoner. My teacher also taught us about the different camps and
how some were worse than others, why the Jews were discriminated against and how the lives

of the jews were bad even before they set foot in the camps. Although it is a sad topic, it is an
important time in history and should be talked about and dissected. !
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I know a lot about the topic, but there is always more to learn. I would definitely like to

know more about how life was inside the camps and how life was outside the camps. I know the
basics about each. Living inside the camps the prisoners had to do a lot of manual labor, but
they had barely any rations of food along with not enough sleep they were slowly killed by starvation and sickness. Children and the elderly typically did not have a chance at all of survival
because they were either killed by gun on the spot or gassed in gas chambers. Women and
men were more than likely separated into different camps which tore families apart. Healthy
men and some women did have chance of survival if they did as they were told. Life outside the
camps for the Jews was not much better than it was inside the camps. They were segregated
into ghettos. It was hard for them to find work because they were required to were the Star of
David on all of their clothing that was visible. Food was hard to find and so were the basic necessities like clean water and clothes. At any given time the Nazi could come into any of the
ghettos and take away the jews to the concentration camps. !
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Another thing I think would be interesting to learn about is to see the perspective from a

person that was not jewish and what they saw. I always wonder if they were just too scared to
say anything or they were just too oblivious to see what was happening in the world around
them. The books and movies especially do not do the horror justice. Although movies like The
Boy in the Stripped Pajamas and Sarahs Key, in my opinion, do a pretty good job of showing
what was actually happening from an outside perspective and an inside perspective. I am excited to learn and write more about the Holocaust in this class. !
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