Bear Witness Holocaust

Elie Wiesel once stated “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness”. Remembrance of historical events is vitally important for the collective narrative. If horrific events such as the Holocaust are allowed to be forgotten, then we have forgotten the significance of the event and debased the people who died. In order to keep the event in the collective narrative, as a way of creating a universal understanding of the tragedy not only for the sake of those directly involved, but also as a warning to future generations, we must as Wiesel states “bear witness”.

As an American, I was taught about the Holocaust in school through literature; we all read the Diary of Ann Frank in middle school and discussed what it must have been like to be

The former children’s home located in the town, is now a small museum which documents the lives of the children who resided there during the 1940’s. As I stated earlier, my class read the Diary of Ann Frank, and that was pretty much our only guide to the children’s perspective of the Holocaust. This children’s house brought a completely new perspective to my understanding of the role of children during the Holocaust. The museum has an entire collection of children’s artwork. The pictures, which are categorized by topic, list the child’s name, age and more often than not, their death. Without the dates, the artwork would look similar to what one would see hanging in an elementary school anywhere in the

We must not forget what they went through, lest we allow it to happen again. Millions of people died due to the prejudice of a political regime. The treatment of the Jewish people in Terezín concentration camp draws parallels to the treatment of North Korean political prisoners in camps through the country. In the novel Escape from Camp 14, Shin Dong-hyuk discusses what it was like growing up within the prison camp and his subsequent escape. He faced extreme prejudice based on his family’s perceived infractions against the regime. The prisoners are kept in terrible conditions and forced to do hard labor for generations, unlike the Nazis who sought to destroy the Jewish population completely, the North Korean government seek to torture their prisoners without an end plan. The treatment of the North Koreans prisoners parallels that of the Jewish