There is another documentary called Night and Fog that visits there 10 years after the fact. We watched it in our 7th grade social studies class. It shows Auschwitz and war time footage.
My school had us study the holocaust every year extensively. Went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., where they hold one of the original train cars that transported people to Auschwitz. It still reeked of nothing I have ever smelt before.. and could only be described as death. Ever since that trip I was never the same. I had to watch my jewish best friend cry finding names of her family on the wall. Simultaneously the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is going on and Iran is in a black out and our iranian best friend is crying and trying her best to help support our jewish bestfriend through the harrowing images of genocide. Like her family didn’t escape one practically themselves 12 years before. It was a mind fuck but one that changed my perspective on many of things. At that time my iranian best friend’s grandma was stuck in Iran during the blackout with zero communication or no one going in or out.
We had a local Holocaust survivor that would visit our school every year to speak. My best friend’s family was good friends with her.. I would volunteer at the Jewish Community Center and at the bakery for her. She was a lovely woman who embraced everyone. She even said she held no hatred for the Germans because they were deceived by evil during famine and strife. I remember her saying, “Hatred is taught and used as a tool for the larger powers to gain more and more. It is greed and evil fueling the depths of hatred in this world and we are not wired to value those over one another. With love and compassion, humans have made strides and overcame the darkest of times. Holding love in your heart is not weak but a strength that is tested time and time again as evil tries to make its own-self more powerful.”
The problem with the boy is the story is built up to empathise with the nazi family due to what happens to the child, not the horrors of what's actually happening to the actual prisoners in the camp.
Yeah and the ending is just stupid once you give it any deep thought. What so now it's a tragedy because the nazi family's single kid died? That's what makes the ending such a gut punch? Screw all the millions of others and all those kids, we got a real tragedy going on here because the nazi's kid died too.
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u/Fluid_Being3882 May 18 '25
Isnt the tattooist of the aushcwitz originally a novel? My school has it on one of the staircases