Week 6

We are already on week 6 of our two-month study abroad program here in Erfurt, Germany.  Upon traveling to Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany, I had felt many emotions.  Our textbook also talks about emotions in chapter 5, explaining that when you experience emotions, it happens in a process.  The process begins with the first step being a trigger or something that gains a person's attention.  For me, that "something" was stepping foot in an actual concentration camp.  The second step begins, as the book states, when we make an appraisal after focusing on the event.  I made this judgement on seeing the actual Holocaust site as something that was un-necessary and brutal, therefore I experienced the correlating emotion, anger.  At this point, I moved on to the third phase; my face became red my breathing became loud due to the physical changes in my body.  The fourth step in the emotional process allowed me to create an action tendency where I would shake my head and walk in a way that people could tell was obvious that I was upset.  I would also cross my arms and stare down people who were being disrespectful.  The final step of the process includes emotional regulation (the decision whether or not to actually use the actions. At this phase, I had to reconsider my actions because I knew that showing my anger would not help anything or change history.  I, instead, decided to try to hold them in for the greater good and not cause any further issues. 

I recognize that anger is probably a lesser emotion than sadness would usually be among visitors at the Holocaust sites.  However, because of my pre-existing interest on the Holocaust topics, I had already experienced the initial sadness shock of the tragedies.  Not to say that I don't get sad anymore over the subject (because trust me, I DO), but I have different aspects on what happened and other knowledge that allows me to see just how much more brutal this major event in history actually was.  I have read books that completely changed the way I had always been taught about this, such as German and Polish citizens were unable to help and did not like what was happening to the Jews, when in reality it was quite the opposite in many cases.  I had read another book about women's roles in the Holocaust and how they would be more than happy to kill Jews for their husbands while bringing out tea for their "hard day at work".  But, the book that allowed me to get the most anger out of the subject was one called "The Holocaust by Bullets" that discussed in Eastern Europe, Jews would be "round up" like cattle and forced to dig ditches and then would line up in groups of 5 (families at a time, mostly) and shot with a single bullet by a single officer.  If a woman had an infant or young enough child, the officer would shoot the mother and the baby together because they didn't want to waste their ammo on Jews..  At this moment in Holocaust studies, one can get passed the sadness stage and move on straight to the anger phase, such as I had.  The information I had learned about through this topic is something that has impacted many of my views. However, until I took that first step onto the grounds where actual Jews were mass murdered in slow and painful deaths through a final solution of a genocide, you will have no clue which emotions you will feel.