For today's excursion we went to the Imperial War Museum. Seeing WWII through the eyes of a Brit was really cool, but the exhibit that hit me the hardest was the Holocaust Exhibit.
Several times while walking through, I found myself with tears in my eyes and I found myself asking: How could the Nazis have had no respect at all for human life? They would round up Jews and shoot them just for the fun of it and beat them until they couldn't walk or stand. They'd kill a man's friends and then make him pray over the bodies just for a laugh. People wouldn't treat animals like that, so why were they treating people that way?
One of the hardest things for me was seeing a glass case full of shoes and seeing the shoes of a little child sitting there. Knowing that a young child lost their life, when they'd barely experienced life, just for being Jewish was really sad for me.
But apart from being sad, it also makes me angry. Why weren't more people standing up and saying, this is wrong? How could they just stand by and let it happen? Worse yet, how can some people even say the Holocaust never happened? Look around, look at the tragic images of people so weak and sick that they couldn't even show happiness when the Allied Powers freed them. Look at the pictures of bodies of stick thin, emaciated people piled on top of each other as if they didn't even matter, as if they didn't have names, or friends, or family.
After seeing this exhibit, I feel like I've changed a bit; my mindset has changed. No matter how bad my life may seem at any given moment, it can't be worse than having no value as a person and being treated like garbage. Having one bad day among a million good ones is better than having to endure years of pain, violence, and torture from others just for being different.
We all worry about such frivolous things, isn't it time we start worrying about things that matter?
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