Holocaust Survivors- video review

                  The Holocaust is an event that will live in people’s minds forever. Everyone has learned about it as some point in their lives, hence showing how important it is in history. While learning about it, many people feel for the humans that were actually involved with this tragic event. Most people could never imagine what it would actually be like to be involved in something as horrific as this. Assembly Access created a video of interviews from survivors telling their personal thoughts and experiences from being kept in a Nazi concentration camp.     

                  About six million Jews were murdered throughout the time period of the Holocaust. After released from the concentrations camps, many were lost and did not know where to take their lives from there. Everything they had was stripped of them. Their houses, clothes, food, and belongings were all gone and out of their reach at that time. Many of the survivors fled all throughout Europe to try and rebuild their lives. Some of the survivors also made the trek to settle in California. The remaining survivors were children when the Nazis, lead by Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. Recently, the California State Assembly, lead by John A. Perez honored the survivors and sponsored a special day of remembrance for these victims. Some of these honorees told their story is the following video.

                   I thought that this video was very powerful. It gives you a different perspective and a reality of how brutal these series of events really were. In the video it states that these survivors, who were children at the time experienced things that will never leave their minds, they will be scarred for as long as they live. Something that stuck out to me was when he said that “there was no hiding the fear that my parents and grandparents were showing.” This impacted me and made me realize, that they were truly scared. They knew that they had done nothing wrong but that the Germans were not going to let them off easy. A good amount of the survivors shared their experiences with wearing the gold star on their clothing. It made them feel uncomfortable and unwanted.  If they did not wear this star, they would get deeply punished-sometimes even to the point of death. Little did they know this was nothing compared to what they were about to experience in the concentration camps. They got on to explain their experiences while in the camps. It was heart breaking for me to watch these people try to tell their story without crying or showing what their real emotions were. I think this added to the video because it made all of the viewers realize how hard this still is for them, even though it happened when they were just children. Overall, I enjoyed this video and I gained a deep gratitude for the survivors who can bare the pain enough to share it with everyone else.