Roland Achuko

UWRT-1102-003
08/31/15
Weekly Writing 1 Assignment
As someone who has spent most of his educational career in the United States I think I
have a good understand of what the holocaust is. My knowledge of the event comes largely from
high school history courses such as United States history, World History, and European History.
Even without those courses though I still probably would have learned just about the same
information from other sources. The Holocaust is considered a defining event world history and a
good example of the horrors that can come from bigotry and intolerance. Still to this day it is
often bought up in popular culture and media. I know that even I never attended a history course
that discussed the holocaust I would have heard about it from movies, books, television shows
and other media. I have watch the film version of The Dairy of Anne, and Life is Beautiful, which
is probably one of the few pieces of media centered on the holocaust that is light-hearted in tone.
Outside of text books I have read Night, which was a personal recounting of author Elie Wiesels
experience in a death camp. So as showed I have knowledge of the basics of the holocaust and
some knowledge of peoples personal experience of it.
What I know about the holocaust is that it was a systemic genocide of what Nazi
Germany thought where undesirables. Contrary to popular belief it was not just the Jewish
people. Romani, Homosexuals and others were targeted. All of this horrific tragedy was in
accordance of Adolf Hitler which was called The final solution.
One of the unfortunate things I learned about Germany and the world at the time was that
anti-Semitism was actually was actually very common not only in Germany but the rest of the

world as well. This is probably while Hitler could rise power and release a book like the Mein
Kampf, where he goes into his anti-Semitism in more detail. In todays world it is hard to
imagine a world-leader that could use some of the rhetoric Hitler used against another group and
not meet with any friction.
Oddly though despite the bigotry the Jewish people faced in Germany, before the rise of
the Nazis a lot of Jewish people were doing well for themselves. This obviously changes with the
Nazis came into power. Some of the population of Jewish people fled because of this. One of the
most individuals being Albert Einstein, scientific feats aside, he was able to save hundreds of
Jewish people from death camps and prosecution.
Unfortunately many people persecuted by the Nazis had no option of leaving Germany.
Eventually, those people were rounded up and sent to labor camps. Which at first was just
intense labor, but eventually the conditions of those camps deteriorated, people would be
tortured, killed and some cases experimented on. This is why after the war those camps would be
known as death camps.
Sadly the horrors of those what went on in those camps were only largely known after the
damage was done. A lot of pictures about what happened in those death camps only came out
after they were liberated.
All of this knowledge of the holocaust to me through a multitude of different facets. This
is probably the same for most people since the holocaust is considered such a pivotal event in
history and has changed the ways most countries deal with human rights abuse. The biggest
example of that being the United Nations which was formed in large part so incidents like the
holocaust could be prevented.