Andrew Lipke's Blog: May 2011

Everyone has heard of Adolf Hitler. Everyone knows that he hated the Jews and killed a lot of them. But you never really prepare yourself for what actually happened. The idea of 600,000 Jews being crowded together like cattle, its not something easily imagined. But when you use film, and crowd a few thousand into an open area, its something to behold. Facing History and Ourselves is not an academic class, it doesn’t have real homework, and there is no real work to speak of. For the majority of the Semester, you sit and watch movies, and for time to time you take about them. The only work to be spoken of is to go online and blog following a film. Its an easy class, but will rip to pieces any thought you had before on race, prejudice, discrimination, and general evil. The films shown in this class are so powerful, so moving, that sometimes even the most cold-hearted people in the class are brought to tears. You’ll discover the dark side of humanity, one that the world has attempted to prevent from ever happening again. You find out what it really took for the most evil man in history to come about and rise to power. You’ll witness the atrocities that the Nazis committed on the Jews and prisoners. But you’ll also witness the greatness of humanity in its struggle to survive. You’ll see the compassion that people can have, even in the darkest hours of time. You’ll see the courage of men and women, ordinary civilians, in standing up against an evil regime. And you’ll understand just what makes humanity so good, but at the same time, understand how easy it is to lose it forever. Take Facing History and Ourselves, take it for your sake, take it for the purpose of knowledge over ignorance. Take the class, so you know the truth, and can never be told it was otherwise.

The experience of discovering a long hidden truth. Uncovering a dark secret of our past, long clouded by rumor and ignorance. At the beginning of this year, Mr. Gallagher explained to everyone in the class how the experience of film is far beyond reading anything on paper or saying anything. Film captures such power in visuals, that print or speak can never imagine to express. Many of us agreed with him there and then, but little did we actual know the true power of film, of what a series of events less than a century ago could look like when portrayed through film, or better yet what it looked like first hand. The execution of one man on film can motivate millions more than a news article reporting the mass slaughter of thousands in protest or even genocide. The films of Facing History gave the class an insight on the world of Nazi Germany, from the rise of the Nazis, to the takeover of populations, and eventually the absolute images of the Holocaust.

The Pride of Nations can bring about monsters. Following the Great War, Germany has in a bad way. Economic hardships led to divisions in the population. Anti-Semitism, already high in Germany, took on a different role and became massive and rampant among the people of Germany. The need for a new, inspiring, and powerful leader was evident, and fate provided the people of Germany with Adolf Hitler, a wounded war veteran with a huge grudge. In the following years Hitler rose to power on a campaign promising a stronger, Jew-free Germany. In the movie Triumph of the Will, Hitler id depicted as the savior of the German people, the man that brought back the power and glory of the true race. Through parades and Labor accomplishments, one man became the god of a population of people. But little did it show that in the near future, Germany would start a war which would be on a level never seen before or since. To see the same film that young German men and women saw all those years ago, to see the power of Hitler over the masses, it was foreboding. To be completely honest, I doubted that had any of the kids in this class been in Germany during the 1920’s and 30’s and had been born in war-ravaged Germany, I doubt any of them, including myself, would not have followed Hitler and the Nazis.

As war broke out in Europe and Poland was conquered, the feeling of desperation and helplessness must have been overpowering. As the German rule set in, Jewish population became a major target with the Polish capitol of Warsaw. Eventually the Ghettos were set up, and the Jewish population became cattle within pens. The Warsaw Jews however, refused to simply wait for their deaths, and the Uprising began. The film the Uprising, as well as the limited section of the Pianist, gave an excellent visual on the resistance to Nazi control within the Ghettos. It was both inspiring and tragic to witness. On one side, the Jews were fighting for freedom and survival. On the other, almost all of them would be slaughtered. Either way, the resistance was better than just accepting their fate, better than waiting to die within the walls. As time went by and fewer and fewer remained, they held strong, traveled through sewers, licked water off of pipes. They refused to simple die, to just accept the end. They fought for the future. Of the hundreds of thousands that went through the Warsaw Ghetto, only a mere few dozen made it out alive through the resistance. They refused to give up, to accept death even though it seemed inevitable. For them to hold out as long as they did was at minimum, pure courage.

What is it that makes people do what they do. Is it because the world tells them to, or perhaps they want to do it. What happens when you’re faced with a choice of survival? Give up strangers on the run to men of evil, or risk your own life, your own family, to so what seems right. The story of Ann Frank’s savior, Miep Gies, was one of sacrifice. In the movie, Freedom Writers, she travels thousands of miles from Amsterdam to Los Angeles in order to tell her story and the story Frank family to a bunch of kids that she doesn’t know. But she does it in a way that brings tears to anyone, because even though she knew that if the Frank family was ever found, her life was hanging in the balance, protecting that family was the right thing to do, and that she wouldn’t be able to live with herself had she given them up. She understood the risks, yet never gave them up. She told her story to those who needed it, who lived in a divided world, like that of Central LA. She gave them a personal experience of what she did. She never did it for fame or glory, pride or money. She did it, she protected that family from the Nazis, because it was the right thing to do. Nothing more, and nothing less. That impact on the kids of that class, filled with kids in a much worse way than us, had massive repercussions.

What Facing History and Ourselves meant to Me; it was a lessons in history, the history of man, and the history of our actions. There are those in the world with beliefs and desires of death and destruction. Sometimes they succeed, but there are others, the Saints and Angels among us, that hold against the evil, and represent the purest of what humanity can be. Sacrifice, Determination, and the Will to Survive against all odds, even in the face of absolute destruction. Facing History and Ourselves taught me that even if the worst is happening, don’t ever let go of who you are, of what you hold dear. To let go of your humanity in order to avoid death, by which you give up others, dear or not, causes you to become what you fear. To lose our humanity, become the evil that powers men such as Hitler, that allows something as big as the Holocaust to occur, and leads to the deaths of millions of people. But should you hold strong in those moments of fear, and deny the evil the right, then you break down the evil, and you may stand among the great and proud of humanity, even if your name is never know. That is what this class gave me.

Andrew Lipke's Blog

Friday, May 20, 2011

Introduction

What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me

Works Cited