Project Final Reflection

I found myself confused frequently with this project. I feel learning the facts and why they are relevant to life today is much more important that presenting how we learned and reflecting on what we did. I feel history class should be "just the facts."

I feel this project added a lot of excess stress because of this. We were told that we should be "more focused on developing skills that you can take with you to life beyond school." I was never exactly sure what that meant or why is was the focus of the project. Yes, the focus of school shouldn't solely be to learn random facts, but that still is what we are expected to learn to be successful in future classes.

However, I did continue to learn more about working collaboratively and how critical time management is.

Project reflection Three

We decided that the most productive and easiest way to finish the project would be to divide up the objectives, get some research on it, and collaboratively make a Prezi. We would each do one objective and we would divide the third one equally as well. We would also look for photos and/ or videos relevant to our objectives.

I found a website that has "Personal Histories" of many different types of people from the Holocaust. These stories are divided into Children, Refugees, Survival, Liberation, Ghettos, Resistance, Deportation, Aftermath, Camps, Hiding, Aid and Escape, and Individuals. That will address the first objective.

The website is http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/phistories/.

For the other objectives, I plan to talk about the creation of the United Nations, European Union, and NATO.

Project Reflection Two

I found a website that contains many letters from Holocaust survivors. I plan to use some of those letters as primary sources and to get quotes. An example of an exerpt from a letter is:

"My Dear Parents!
If only the sky were paper and the world ink, I wouldn’t be capable of describing to you my suffering and all that I see around me.
The camp is situated in a forest clearing. Already early in the morning they take us out to work in the forest. The soles of my feet are bleeding, because they took my shoes from me. We work all day, with hardly any food, and at night we sleep on the ground (they also took our coats from us). Every night drunken soldiers come and beat us with wooden sticks, and my body is already black from bloodstains under the skin and it looks like a piece of charred wood. Sometimes they toss us some uncooked carrots, or beets, and this is shameful and disgraceful: here fists fly in order to grab a little piece or a small leaf. The day before yesterday two boys escaped, so they lined us up in a row, and every fifth one in the line was shot to death. I was not the fifth but I know that I will not leave here alive. I part from you, dear Mother, dear Father, dear brothers, and I cry…"

I feel quotes like these will help present the severity of the Holocaust and hardships victims had to suffer through. I also want to look into similar letters from all of the different groups.

I also found a website that contains many primary sources about various aspects of the Holocaust that will be extremely beneficial in researching the project further. It is http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/?lang=en&content=primary_sources#01-nazi_germany.

The picture at the top of this post is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, and it is of Americans organizing many documents from Germany.

Project Reflection One

For this project, Cinthya and I decided to work together. We were both interested in learning and researching about The Holocaust. So, we looked at some of the objectives we would like to research further. The three we decided on were:

1. Compare the varying perspectives of victims, survivors, bystanders, rescuers, and perpetrators during the Holocaust.
2. Explain how WWII and the Holocaust led to the creation of international organizations to protect human rights, and describe the subsequent impact of these organizations.
3. Assess the responses of the United States and other nations to the violation of human rights that occurred during the Holocaust and other genocides.

Then, we saw there was no preset essential question that encompassed these objectives, so we created our own. Our central idea for the project is “How did the different groups affected by the Holocaust respond, and how did the United States and other countries respond? Was it enough?”

The format of the project will be a Prezi because we feel it will be able to best convey the severity of the Holocaust as well as what each group felt (Objective 1). Then we can lead into the organizations and actions of nations in reaction to the Holocaust (Objectives 2 and 3).