International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On Thursday was The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, so to, for lack of a better word, celebrate that the entire school went to concentration camp that is fourty minutes away. The concentration camp we went to is called Falstad. Now I've been to Auschwitz I and II, Ravensbrücka and Sachsenhausen in 10th grade. You can't really compare Falstad to those four camps because unlike those camps it's been used in different way post WWII. Right after the war it was used as a school for boys with handicaps, the town also had to tear down many of the buildings for supplies because of the condition Norway was in.

I'm not going to write a history paper, so I'll get to my point. We were lead into the main building which is used as a museum/conference center; they're redone the entire place and there aren't any traces of the horrors that happened the four years The Nazis reigned. The school was split into two groups, my group saw first a one women show based on diary entries from the people who were held captive at Falstad, then we saw a presentation about genocides in the world that have happened pre and post WWII.

After lunch was when we went into the basement that's been turned in to a museum. Myself and many of my classmates could feel that many horrid things had happened in this basement and the entire mood of the day shifted into a somber one. The thing I thought that was the most difficult if I can even say that was a room that had all the names of all the people who had been held captive; their names, why they were there, when they came and when they were either excicuted or set free. I was startled to find many people named both Borch and Svendson. I don't think that any of those people were related to me, but seeing my last name on that wall left me with a slightly nauseated feeling.

Ever since the trip we had in 10th grade and because of my Bess, I've gotten very interested in WWII. I think it's horribly fasinating that an entire nation can be manipulated into doing such horrible things. And I find it even more fasinating that we have a day like to never forget WWII and to remind people so that a genocide like that never happens again, but it has. Just to mention two, Rwandan Genocide (1994) and Srebrenica Massacre (1995). I used to think of the word genocide as something that happened long ago, but I've lived in a time when it's happened and I find that so unreal.

I should probably end this in a better way, but it's dinner and if I leave this computer now I won't remember to publish this. So sorry for the abrupt ending here, but I'll update again soon (hopefully).

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