📺CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE STUDENTS' EXPERIENCE & HEAR THEIR REACTION TO THEIR VISIT📺 (HIGHLY RECOMMEND WATCHING TO THE END).
An experience at times difficult to grasp.
The Arp High School sophomore class had the opportunity to visit the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
This was following their reading of the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel in their English 2 classes.
Going through the galleries and exhibits of the museum gave the students a powerful first hand account, which helped them better understand the book.
In Night, Wiesel, a Jewish man recounts the dehumanizing experiences he survived as a teenager when he and his father were sent to Nazi German concentration camps in the mid 1940's. His father died in one of those camps from a beating in his presence.
The compelling and terrifying reality left quite an impression on our students as they got to see what life was really like for many of those people during and around the time of the second world war.
"I thought it was good that we learned about it in class, and got to experience it in person and see what the Jews went through in the Holocaust," said sophomore Caden Cliborn. "We just see it in books a lot of the times, and that doesn't do it justice. Seeing it in person, it's eye opening."
"(We) learned the importance of real life, like how we could have been treated, and how we're treated now," sophomore Kelsey Stinecipher explained.
"It's just terrible because that was a quote that said the people were oiling up the machines, and they weren't feeding the people. And those people were working really hard, and they barely got fed. Looking at (them), they were very skinny. You could see their ribs and everything," described sophomore Julian Barocio.
"It's just unimaginable that people truly lived through this. One exhibit was a cattle car (box car) and in that cattle car would have been 80 people. That would be everyone that we brought on this trip, crammed into one location," details English teacher and trip organizer Mrs. Nancy Spain.
"Something that the students have to realize is that you can not pull apart the history from the literature that is produced within the time period. And I think we accomplished that," Spain stated.
The students also got to take in a strong lesson on the human rights movement at the museum and learn more about those who stood up (upstanders) for them.
