Girl listening intently.

Thursday 26th March 2009.

Today we had a guest speaker in at school... a survivor from the Holocaust.
Normally if I'm listening to someone speak, then after twenty minutes at the most I'm already looking around the room and shuffling in my chair. However this time I was transfixed for an hour and a half.
I've never had such respect for a person within seconds of them walking into a room. When an hall full of school children are asked to stand while someone walks in they always do it just because they have to, but today there wasn't a sigh of hostility amongst the hundreds of people there.
The man himself was absolutely iconic. He kept referring to himself as being a very lucky person, and all I kept asking myself is how can someone go through such a life of hardship, pain and ordeals and still come out of it claiming they're lucky?
I guess that it puts all my traumas and troubles into a great deal of perspective. How can we moan about trivial things every day when there are so many people out there suffering in the world we live in today. The speaker said one situation that really struck me to be moving; the government in power in England now insist that they're doing all they can to help developing countries that are suffering from poverty, which all seems fair and good - even if it is a little exaggerated... but try telling a mother that's lost a child that you're 'doing your best'. Obviously our best isn't good enough. And we should want to make something more of ourselves and our society.
As for the holocaust I can't do it justice in a little blog. There's no amount of my rattle that could ever even come to terms with such evil. And I don't think anyone will ever truly be able to understand how someone could do such things to completely innocent people.
They say they were 'following orders'. There's no such thing as 'following orders' to such an extent. That is plain and simply committing mass murder... genocide.
Don't you think it's disgusting that we have to have a word for killing millions of people?
We hear quite a few things about survivors of the Holocaust, there are many books published about them and TV documentaries. We can merely begin to imagine what they went through.
I think to be able to learn about a surviving Nazi Prison Guard would also be very interesting.
A survivor can see their lives as 'lucky' and be thankful for their fate and having the strength to be able to live through it. However a Prison Guard has to live with regret, hatred from the world and knowing they're weak.
Personally I'm not sure who I fell more sorry for...

Girl listening intently.
x.