Study history so it won’t be forgotten
It seems like in today’s society, any kind of discussion of a historical mistreatment toward a group of people is taboo.
I recently wrote a research paper on diaries of the Holocaust with my main point being the reliability and how they should affect people of later generations. Survivors of the Holocaust and families of victims published these diaries to provide people a personal point of view of the horrors of the Holocaust. They didn’t want their stories to collect dust and to be used as decoration in a living room to help someone look more cultured. They also published them to provide insights for historians studying the Holocaust so they can get the real story of what happened in the concentration camps.
While some historians are suspicious of emotion playing too large of a part in their diary or memoir, most take diaries as a reliable source with a few understandable inconsistencies.
Writing this paper really changed my perspective on the Holocaust and other instances of genocide. I believe that everyone should research and, at least, discuss this horrible past so that we can prevent it from happening again. Let’s not be doomed to repeat our history because we are not willing to talk about it.
MARISSA WEISS