Lessons From the Past
For the first time since the beginning of the eighth grade school year, my classmates and I fell silent. Our naive thirteen-year-old faces looked upon the face of a man with deep lines in his face that each seemed to tell their own story. A closer glance at his forearm revealed a faded tattoo. A tattoo that nearly six million other men, women and children just like him were marked with during the Holocaust. That day I was changed. I was transformed by this survivor’s story, and by the unit we did in social studies that year about the Holocaust. It is the reason that seven years later I still keep a golden paperclip in a box full of memories under my bed in remembrance of the six million people killed during the Holocaust. It is also the reason I am pursuing a career as an educator. I believe so strongly in the power of knowledge to make the world a better place. I will fiercely advocate for education about the Holocaust for students. This topic is so critical to teach young people about so that they understand where this atrocity originated and how it originated. The Holocaust did not start all at once. It was borne from hate, from intolerance and from a slow progression of oppression. Young people must be taught how to recognize the beginnings of such events to prevent them from reoccurring.
