I'm in this class right now called Senior Symposium. It is a general education class that is required for graduation and varies a lot based on who teaches it and what the theme of the class is. The theme of my class is "The Crisis of Belief in the Modern Age" and it is taught by a religion professor. I'm an English major with a minor in European history. Keep this in mind, it will matter later. My professor has decided (unwisely) to teach us through literature.
Right now we are in the middle of reading Night by Elie Wiesel. If you haven't heard of it, you have probably been living under a rock.
A Little Necessary Background Information: Last semester, I studied in Wittenberg, Germany with a professor who is a Holocaust scholar. I took a Holocaust class and took an intensive learning class on the process of memorializing the Holocaust and the inherent difficulties with doing this all while living in Germany. I'm not super amazing, but I know my stuff. I visited the
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and spent a total of about 19 hours in both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II- Birkenau. It was an experience that I'm glad I underwent, even though it was difficult. As callous as this will sound, I don't want to think about the Holocaust for a good amount of time. I'm done with it, and if I continued to focus on it I'd probably let it overtake my sanity. I would be a mess.
Fast Forward to the Present: I went into class, and we began discussing Night. We only had to read halfway through it. My professor addressed it in a way that I thought was idiotic. Different majors are all in this class, so we all don't have the same background. As we are discussing the novel, one girl revealed that she didn't know that there are Holocaust deniers. Which I don't understand how you don't know that and are supposedly an educated person in college. A friend of mine stated that the Allies didn't know about the camps. I practically jumped down his throat because he was flat out
wrong.
We eventually moved on to the denial that Wiesel talks about in his novel. Many of the Jews thought that they would be fine, and didn't believe the things that they were hearing about the camps. My professor then asked if we could think of instances now where people have this kind of self-denial. And he then proceeded to say that perhaps the way people deny that global warming is happening is comparable. People then started to chime in with things like "We choose to not think about the fact that we might die tomorrow and think that it is far off in the future". I'm not even joking. This stuff isn't even comparable. One instance is of a reality of life--people die everyday. The other is that a government systematically rounded up people that didn't fit into the right ethnic profile like the Jews and the Roma and Sinti or homosexuals, and killed them through asphyxiation, starvation, beatings, and more. It was so offensive.
I added to the discussion in that I corrected a few misconceptions and added some necessary background information, but after a while it was disheartening. I was feeling slightly ill during the whole class, because reading Night made me remember walking by the bombed out gas chambers in Birkenau and wading through mud that when it dried left flecks of white human ashes on my shoes and jeans. I didn't put up a big stink about the bullshit that was taking place, and now I feel horrible. I should have put up a stink, because like the picture says, these people will continue to believe this bullshit and spread it around.
We have class tomorrow and will conclude our discussion of Night, and I won't let myself lapse into silence again. I'll let you know how it goes.
