Just this afternoon, my father showed me one of my Aunt Sandrah’s albums in Facebook. He showed me some pictures that my aunt took when she visited one of the Holocaust concentration camps in Germany. I was really, really shocked with what I saw. Gas chambers, bunks, clothes worn by some people, and the most terrible sight: TWO TONS OF HAIR shaved from those poor Jewish people persecuted by Hitler (if I could remember it right, before the Jews enter the concentration camps, they were forced to strip naked, be disinfected, and then have their hairs shaved). There were even pictures of those people killed and persecuted, some of which are children. I almost cried when I saw those pictures. I am, until now, terrified with those pictures I saw.But then, that experience led me to remember one of the most prominent writers in history: the diarist Anne Frank.
I started searching her name in the Internet and read about her life during my break in studying for our long test in Math 17 this Tuesday. As I was reading, I could feel the bitterness that her family has gone through while in hiding.
As I continued reading her biography in Wikipedia, I found the following lines that really struck me the most. To quote:
“[Nanette] Blitz described her [Anne] as bald, emaciated, and shivering and [Hanneli] Goslar noted Auguste van Pels was with Anne and Margot Frank, and was caring for Margot, who was severely ill. Neither of them saw Margot as she was too weak to leave her bunk.”
“In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp and killed approximately 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses later testified Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock, and a few days later, Anne died.”
And believe it or not, those thoughts were still lingering on my mind as I am practicing solving problems in Mathematics (as in honest to goodness!). In fact, as I was multiplying algebraic expressions (using Special Products), the thought of Margot falling off her bunk weakly, dying because of the shock, and Anne dying from typhus a few days later, was still lingering in my mind, picturing how awful it was for them to experience a brutal kind of death, just because Hitler “wants to clean the race” by persecuting Jews.
I am thankful that I did not live at that period of time, but even though I did not experience those, I have learned a lot of things from the events that affected history in its broadest sense. I also feel sympathy and pity to those poor, innocent people who died just because of someone’s hidden agenda and desire for power.
Thankfully, I was able to finish studying Math. Whew! Tomorrow, I’ve got to study for my other quizzes: Chemistry 15, Chemistry 15.2 (Laboratory), and P.E. 1. Three more to go!
Note: I want to cite the source from which the italicized, quoted lines came:
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