Madeline

How has my world view changed since the study of World War II?

By: Madeline

The day of our very first discussion, which happened to mostly be on World War I, I really didn’t think too much of it. I never would’ve guessed that learning about World War II and the Holocaust would impact my everyday life so much. I’ve realized for quite a long time now how lucky we are today to live the lives we do, and that there have been some very cruel people in history, but I never would have guessed how far it had gone during that time. Sure, I knew that Adolf Hitler was an evil and crazy man who hated Jews, and he’d done all kinds of appalling things to them. But I never knew too much about what exactly those terrible things were, or how many people had suffered.

As unexciting as some lectures may seem, they really do give all the information you’d ever want to know about World War II and the Holocaust. One thing that is hard to imagine is that you couldn’t really trust anybody. In some cases, you weren’t even able to trust your own family. Some of the lectures told about kids who were members of Hitler Youth clubs and turned in their own parents for some of the smallest of reasons. If someone who followed Hitler heard you make a meaningless joke about his moustache, you could be sent straight to a concentration camp. That gives you an idea of how careful you had to be in Germany at all times.

One thing I was surprised to find out is how the Americans didn’t come into the big picture for a while. It wasn’t until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that they really got into action. The Japanese believed that the Americans were lazy, and it would be a walk in the park to attack us. But they were wrong.

From interviewing my World War II veteran, I began to realize that all of those people who died weren’t just a bunch of faceless individuals; each of those people had once been a person -- a person with a family, with friends, with a life. When I asked my veteran what he thought his biggest accomplishment was, he told me that his biggest accomplishment was coming back alive.

That statement hit me like a soccer ball kicked right into my stomach. It was an answer I certainly hadn’t been expecting. As obvious as it may have seemed, I had been expecting something more like a specific award he had won for a certain achievement, or something else along those lines. Actually, in a way he did win an award. From everything he had done, all the accomplishments he’d made, all the friends he had lost, all the grief he’d gone through; after all of that, the award he received in return was his life. This man, out of millions of men who had fought, had come out alive. God definitely had a reason for that. As my veteran replied when I asked him if the war was worth it, "What would you do – GIVE UP? We had to fight in World War Two. There was just no other way. You can’t sit still and expect to keep your freedom, and that’s a lesson we should never forget." I believe that I will remember that statement for the rest of my life.