Genocide Museum Book Report

As the professor James W Loewer, author of the book, referred that Americans have lost touch with their history. Our teachers and textbooks play important roles in our history study. However, it is their eliding and misrepresenting factoids that have been obstacles in our history studying. Because access to too much errors and distortion, many Americans can hardly understand the past of the country. As a result, we lack the ability to reflect on what’s going on right now and in the future.

There are also monuments that are more salient and mention the concentration camps that the individuals survived (Appendix B, Figure 2). The community purposefully includes monument inscriptions to show an individual’s connection to the Holocaust. This action creates tribute to those who were victims of the Holocaust. This practice also creates a collaborative means for the community to mourn over these survivors.

The Holocaust was the systematic killing and extermination of millions of Jews and other Europeans by the German Nazi state between 1939 and 1945. Innocent Europeans were forced from their homes into concentration camps, executed violently, and used for medical experiments. The Nazis believed their acts against this innocent society were justified when hate was the motivating factor. The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on a society. It forces societies to examine the responsibility and role of citizenship, in addition to approaching the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction. (Holden Congressional Record). Despite the adverse treatment of the Jews, there are lessons that can be learned from the Holocaust: The Nazi’s rise to power could have been prevented, the act of genocide was influenced by hate, and the remembrance of the Holocaust is of the utmost importance for humanity.

Americas history is what defines us and who we are as a country. We were built on hard work, sacrifice, wanting to be free and independent to be who we want to. Now a-days, we seem to have fallen away from this. Everything is given to us so easily on our computer and through technology that we have no need to work hard anymore. This is the downfall in humanity because as we keep going, life will continue to get easier and we won’t want to do anything. History is our hope so that we can learn from what we did in our past and how things were done then.For starters, we can see what mistakes we did and make sure we don’t do them again. If we continue to the same thing over and over again, there’s no way for our society to improve from this. Our

"History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for… But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we've been through in times past and who we are.” McCullough believes that history repeats itself and that the past is not only a source of direction, but it is what shapes us. “There’s no such thing as a self-made man,” (290) he said. As we know, the revolutionary war allowed the creation of what we now know as the United States of America. “1776”, written by author David McCullough, invites us to be a part of America’s battle for

Many students always wonder why they have to take a history class. I myself have wondered this question many times, because history seems irrelevant to one’s education. In contrary, history is a vital subject to one’s education. It has been said numerous times that we take history so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes we have made in the past. Students retain different portions of information when learning something new. The recurring pattern that I have retained from sitting through numerous history classes, is the sense of patriotism. The American way of life has formed its own definition of patriotism from the Mayflower to 9/11 there has been a constant recurrence of patriotism.

Bohjalian goes back and forth between second person narrative when it depicts the events during the Armenian genocide with interjections from present day Laura Petrosian, descendant of an Armenian genocide survivor. Laura, the impact survivors and victims of genocide have on later generations. While the book makes it clear that Laura, and by extension Bohjalian, have done their research in providing factual information, the first personal narrative account given to Laura conveys the growing emotional connection developed over the course of her research. By allowing us to see the thought process and visceral emotional reactions of Laura through the first person point of view, Bohjalian proves that the stories and experiences victims and survivors can impact the actions and feelings of people in present day, transgenerationally, meaning their stories can never be obsolete.

When we encounter a Holocaust survivor, a lot of questions come to our mind. We start to wonder how did they manage to survive. We tend to assume that once the Holocaust was over, survivors began to reestablish their lives and their pain disappeared. However, Holocaust survivors suffered, and even after 70 years after the liberation, Holocaust survivors still experience difficulties on their day-to-day basis. In the years followed the Holocaust they struggled with their painful memories while attempting to renew their lives, most of them in new countries. The Holocaust was one of the greatest massacres against humanity. As time goes by, the Holocaust survivors’ memories start to fade. The obligation to remember is engraved

Memorialization of any sort can be a tedious process, but those regarding Holocaust remembrance were particularly challenging given the surrounding social and political controversies that ensued. This is primarily seen through the issue of representation, which consistently played a key role in the creation of both the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., and the Dachau concentration camp memorial. While the Dachau memorial’s conception stages, the designers were contemplating which victim groups to include. For instance, the mayor of Dachau stated, “Please do not make the mistake of thinking that only heroes died in Dachau. Many inmates were…there because they illegally opposed the regime of the day….You have to remember there were many criminals and homosexuals in Dachau. Do we want a memorial to such people?” (Harold Maruse, “Dachau,” 151). With this quote, the mayor implies that the memorial will only be dedicated to those he deems worthy of representation. Likewise, the White House officials orchestrating the American Holocaust Museum also debated a similar notion regarding the inclusion of ethic victim groups other than the Jews. However, Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors believed that commemorating non-Jews was an “…obscene incursion into the boundaries of Holocaust memory by those whose country-men had persecuted survivors” (Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 53). For this reason, and in order to avoid the generation of false memories, these groups

I never thought my sophomore english class would change my perspective on the world. Even though it was an honors class the syllabus fairly standard books planned for the year such as jane eyre and julius caesar. Nothing special until my teacher said that there was a book we were going to read that wasn't on the list. It was first they killed my father. The title was intriguing and even though it was only the frost week of school no one was afraid to speak up and ask what the book was about. The teacher replied it was about the cambodian genocide. No one had a response because no one had ever heard that there was a genocide in cambodia. Through our 9 years of schooling and multiple required history classes we had never even heard a word.

Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish

The Rwandan Genocide affected our world in many ways. This genocide was one of the largest genocides since World War II.

For instance, Peter Drost defined genocide as the “deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such.” Henry Huttenbach defined it as “any act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy.” It can, thus, be observed that the jurisprudence surrounding genocide has developed rapidly in the recent years and there has been a spurt in public interest in the topic, along with an increase in the research on genocide, leading to many legal, scientific and sociological studies. The crime has also been explored in the popular culture through various movies exhibiting real incidents such as The Killing Fields, Schindler’s List, and Hotel Rwanda.

When I went to the Holocaust Muesam with my class last year there was one thing that realy wowed me. This thing that wowed me was when I saw the list of all the children that died there. I will always remember this because when I saw the list I went and put my self in the children's parents shoes and them finding out that there chidren died. Along with the thing that wowed me, something realy made me wounder. The thing that made me wounder when I was at the Holocaust Muesam was no Americans reacted to all the torture that the Nazis were doing to all the Jews. I will remember this because when I walked in to the gas chamber and they explained the gas I was woundering how did the Allies not come and attack the Germans as soon as they found out.

Genocide, a dire event, has been recurring time and time again throughout history. In the past, there was the Holocaust, where Hitler exterminated over six million Jews based on his anti-semitic views. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish author, has become a very influential man in educating the world of the true events of the Holocaust due to his involvement in the disaster. Presently, a genocide is occurring in the Darfur region of southern Sudan, in which according to Cheryl Goldmark, “a systematic slaughter of non-Arab residents at the the hands of Arab militiamen called Janjaweed” has been taking place since 2003. (1) Not only is genocide a tragic historical event, it also continuously occurs today.