This is a blog about the holocaust. Over the past few weeks we’ve been diving into the holocaust; one of the worst, most systematic genocide of an entire group of peoples, purely based on misinformed beliefs. We learned about these events through many different forms of media and formats, including articles, pictures, videos, books, and live testimonies from actual Holocaust survivors. Experiences like the live testimonies came from our short field study out to the annual Vancouver Holocaust Symposium held at UBC. It’s been nearly 80 years since the end of WW2, which unfortunately means soon there will be no survivors left to tell their stories. Being able to hear these stories in person will always be very interesting and valuable, so we’ve been very lucky to be able to have this experience even with the events of the holocaust so far away.
We covered a lot during this project, but to keep it brief there was one main takeaway of the holocaust convention, and of the entire project at large.
We cannot generalize or stereotype groups of people.
Of course certain groups of people can have similar intrinsic beliefs, but that is not sufficient evidence to make any meaningful judgments about that person. As soon as you start generalizing people based on simple factors like race or religion, you stop seeing them as people. Everybody will have nuances, everybody will have differences. Just because they are part of a certain group doesn’t mean you automatically know everything about them.
During this time we also had an assembly from The Other People, a group of people trying to dismantle the stereotype based discrimination that is unfortunately on the rise. I found their panel and pitch to be a interesting way to tackle some of the arising problems. In todays world, it’s becoming increasingly easy to point to the other side of the world and put the blame on them. By simply having conversations with people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, you have real human connections to many different groups of people. This way you become less susceptible to broad stereotypes thrown to dehumanize the other, since you have an actual human baseline.
As for the actual work that we did, the biggest assignment was a literary criticism of the Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus.
Overall it was a very intriguing and layered book, that covered many different topics and symptoms those who went through the holocaust face. From the visual format, the human imperfect characters to the story within a story, there was lots we could pull from to write our analysis. Essays have never been my strong suit, and while it may not be perfect, I think it manages to get my points across.
See you next time,
Nolan