Introduction

Facing History in Ourselves is an elective offered at my high school. This is a course that will teach you some history but more importantly teach you about yourself. This course covers three major historical events. The course starts with the Armenian Genocide then moving to the Jim Crow Era and finally into the Holocaust. In this course you are forced to look at some disturbing images and films but they are used to give you a sense of what these actual people went through. The class makes you think about who you are and what you would do in certain situations. I am a 17 year old teenage boy living in Westborough, number of years after these events took place. Before taking this class I thought I understood the events we learned about. I was wrong after taking this class I learned how bad it actually was. It also asked me to think if I was in some of these people’s situations what would I do. Honestly I don’t know what I would have done. Some things that people did to survive was outstanding and brave and to me un-comprehendible, but they did it for the will to survive. I took this class for a couple of reasons, but the big one was to learn about who I was and whether I was an onlooker or someone who would step in. I honestly till this day could not tell you who I would be. The events that these people were put in were far to harsh and to hard to think about. I did learn a lot during though; I learned that there were fighters during the Holocaust and that African Americans have an extremely high tolerance against racism and violence and that a whole race of people can be massacred for no apparent reason.