Personal Narrative: The Night That Stood Out

Although the entire reenactment was impactful, I would say there were two points in the night that stood out to me. In complete improvisation, we decided to take a march around Commons in a single file line. Since no one else had any idea what was happening, it was quite embarrassing for them; they could see the watchful eyes and hear people whispers Why do they all have numbers? but they could not say a word, demonstrating their loss of power. Another meaningful moment of the night was the selection. A significant debate among the perpetrators was where to hold the selection. Our initial inclination was to perform it in the front of Commons by the ice cream. However, some of the perpetrators’ boundaries were compromised by this, and a few

As the commandant, at one point, I determined we would do it in front of everyone. While we lined them up, many people in the dining hall were shushing, as if they were expecting some sort of performance. Wirths (Zach) seemed as though he was ready, but Mengele (Nadav) was obviously very uncomfortable doing the selection in such a public area, which was distracting Wirths. In this whole process, we ended up standing there without doing anything for a long time, and the longer we stood there, the more attention we drew to ourselves. It was mortifying. Eventually, we left the main area and finished it in the coffee section of Commons. This situation demonstrates the difference between the actual perpetrators of the Holocaust and us: our morals and emotional

The thought of intentionally acting like such a malicious person, like Rudolf Hoess, was hard for me to handle. Although I know it would be difficult for anyone in the class to hold my position or a perpetrator in general, I do feel as though I had a harder time dealing with this compared to the other perpetrators. I believe this conflict of emotions I had shows how corrupt the Nazis’ actions during the Holocaust truly were, and we did not even do close to half of the horrible things they did. It is troublesome for me to imagine doing anything worse to another human being than what we did, while the Nazis did so much worse to thousands upon thousands of Jews and other minorities every single day for years. The amount of distress and uncomfortable feelings I had toward acting this way to my peers, even with the smallest actions, was more than I thought it would be. I was constantly thinking I was doing something wrong in the back of my mind, even though it was for an assignment, and I was hesitant with many of the actions I took. On top of everything, it was most of all embarrassing since we did all of this in a public setting where no one knew why we were doing this. I could feel the eyes of everyone watching us and their minds questioning us, making it even harder for me to imagine this as a real event that took place. Despite all of this, I do believe my role was easier in a way; I did not have to