Mempry of the Camps essays

Mempry of the Camps essays I decided to sign up and take this class, I understood that there was a very good possibility we were going to be exposed to unsettling material and graphic images. After all, everyone knows the holocaust was a tragic time with brutal consequences. I believed that I was ready and able to handle this material with the ease that I handled all previous material that Ive had to review when studying the holocaust. Ive even been to the National Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. a couple times, enforcing my own belief that I would be able to deal with anything thrown at me during this course. That belief, however, dropped to the bottom of my stomach along with everything else after watching the first five minutes of Memory of the Camps. I have never seen a video like this one before. It seemed as if every image that was on screen was the most horrible until a new image came up, and then that took the title. The hardest thing about this film is that they didnt talk about anything I havent heard before: brutal starvation, deplorable treatment of all prisoners, executions, gas chambers, ovens, torture. The way that this particular video shows the effects of these methods of genocide is much different than anything Ive been exposed to. Perhaps the most disturbing thing shown in the video was what began to seem like constant footage of mass graves. There must have been at least ten gigantic graves in the first camp alone, most of them numbering with body counts in the thousands. Maybe even more disturbing was that the last couple of graves shown had an unknown number of bodies, implying that towards the end of the burial process it had just gotten so bad that they couldnt continue to count. It wasnt just the staggering number of dead bodies that was unnerving, however. It was also the condition in which most of the dead were found. Most of them were basically skeletons with a...