Back from Poland

Dana D., the Amal Comprehensive School, Safed

One of the most important things I have learned from my journey to Poland is that it's not enough to deal with the killing institutions as simple tools that served the wishes of the Nazis, or as machines that the leadership operated at the push of a button to get what it wanted. Behind the institutions and machines were people, Germans, and without those Germans the Holocaust would never have happened.

The murderers had an identity. We don't need to categorize them as Nazis or the S.S. The most suitable way to describe them is by using their real name - Germans. The Germans acted in the name of Germany and its popularly elected leader, Hitler. All of them were Germans who wanted to achieve one goal, to exterminate the German people. They were ordinary Germans, human beings motivated by anti-Semitism, and not by the government of the day, psychology or pressure. It was their prejudice against Jewish people that motivated them to kill millions of innocent and helpless men, women and children without pity.

The Germans murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust and if Germany had not been defeated they would probably have killed many more.

It is important to remember that the murderers were human beings just like us. They were motivated by hate and acted out of their own free will, not fear. It is important to remember this because we don't want it ever to happen again.

This article previously appeared in TEN - The Youth Newspaper of the Amit & Amal Schools in Safed, Spring 1998.

For additional student writing on this subject, see: A Journey to Poland, We Marched with the Living, and Poland.

For other related materials, check out the following Amalnet sites (in Hebrew):
The Holocaust, Holocaust Literature, and Journey to Poland

© 1998, Amal Pedagogical Technological Center