United States Memorial Holocaust Museum

     Last week our GT Class took a field trip to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. It was a great time. The museum was fantastic.
     Heading to the museum, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. From what I heard from my classmates and my teachers, the museum was supposed to pretty good. I somewhat expected it to be a sad museum. I knew the atmosphere would be somber.
     I saw and learned so many things at the museum. I was amazed at how many primary sources the museum had. Photographs, articles of clothing, and eyewitness accounts. There was so much information to take in. Some of the exhibits that touched me the most were teh picture of the hair pile, the all white model of the etermiantion process, and the voices of holocaust victims room. Many of the exhibits touched me emotionally by allowing me to connect to the victims on a personal human level. Sometiems we just think of the Holocaust as an event. But we can truly appreciate the tragedy if we imagine goign through the trama oursleves.
     I felt a tornado of emotions while touring the museum. Walkign through the museum is an emotionally draining expereince. Overall it's a saddening museum. Regardless, it's still interesting to analyze the how and why this event happened. I felt sad, angry, and confused. Just so many questions to ask. Why did this happen? How could bystanders allow this to happen?
    In the end, I will take a few important ideas from this experience. The "bear witness" slogan is something I will surely never forget. I hope to be able to remember this event and help our society make sure it never occurs again. And most of all from this museum, I will keep the personal connection that I made with over 6 million people; the six million people who experienced the holocaust.

(Here's a picture of the identification card we received upon going through the exhibit. Each person followed a holocaust victim through his/her journey).

Conclusion: Hope, Humanity, and the Human Spirit

As I look back on my experience learning about hope, humanity, and human spirit I feel quite accomplished. For the conclusion of the unit, Andrew, Ronak and I worked together on a group presentation to further explore the topic of humanity. We were quite inspired by Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civilisation Animate video. So we took some of Rifkin's ideas and ran with them. We aimed to research how humans have connected on tribal, religious, and national levels. As Rifkin questioned how we can connect and empathize as one global community, we also wondered how this can be accomplished. Finally, we also wanted to see if there is hope for the human race. Along the way we found an incredible timeline by Brian Holtz that posed a timeline of future events for humanity. You have to check it out here!!!!! I also came into contact with Matt Erikson through his blog. He provided some useful insight about religion and religious connections between people. His blog can be viewed here. This project was a lot of fun and taught me a lot. It's opened my eyes to many things, like humanity's future, that I never truly thought about before. Other groups and their presentations made me think about the psychological perspective and how loneliness can affect human beings. I'm able to take what I know and believe from my religious background and combine it with what I've learned through this project to determine my own beliefs and predictions about humanity. Ronak's video and our PowerPoint presentation were very successful in presenting what we learned and did throughout the project. I'm very satisfied with the project. And I've definitely learned a lot about hope, humanity, and the human spirit from this unit. Plus I've given thought to ideas that I never have considered before, which is always a good thing.