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Courage vs. Evil
April 21st, 2008 by arielal09
Tomorrow we have a guest speaker at our school. The speaker is going to be a girl from Dallas who is planning to talk to us about the holocaust (us being the seventh and eight graders). Apparently she did a bat-mitzvah project about courageous non Jewish people who saved and helped Jews. Today in class, a teacher was explaining to my class that we were going to miss class the next day due to the lecture. Several students didn’t understand what the speaker will be talking about. I explained to them what I wrote above, which is what my mom told me days prior. As it turned out, they weren’t really supportive of the whole thing, and seemed confused. One said it made no sense for the speaker to be a girl our age who will be talking about the holocaust; I mean she was no survivor or anything. The teacher smartly told him to make his own judgment after the lecture.
When I got home today I asked my mom the same thing as the student. It did seem kind of weird we would have a guest speaker talking about the holocaust when she did not live through it, or is a professional in the field. My mom said she thought students would question that and explained that when you stand up and praise people who did something brave it is a way to stop evil, or at least take it off course. At first this did not make sense to me. I mean yeah we kind of all know that right? Even if we do not put it in those same exact words. Then why do we need a guest speaker to tell us so? Is it that we are so ignorant of the fact, or that we in fact do not do anything courageous on daily life? Then it came down to me like a wave. It wasn’t that we did not understand the dangerous and life risking situations that these people were in (which I believe we probably didn’t) but it was the fact that this girl was brave enough (I’ll explain the brave later) to praise and acknowledge these people who risked so much. It was that she went out of her daily life to research people most of us might never have heard of, and congratulate them in a way for making something kind and unreasonably brave and making something else in life a little less evil. I mean not an act of stopping evil, but an act of giving these courageous people an acknowledgement for making something kind in this world full of horror. When I say brave I am both referring to the people who saved Jews (of course that was brave of them) and I also give some praise to the girl, for whom she gave the honor.
What this girl did as a bat-mitzvah project I think is something very important that not many people do. I of course, do not know this girl and had never heard of her before this. She may give the most boring talk in the world, and I would probably be too busy with the so many possible distractions to pay attention. Obviously, half the middle school will be thrilled to be missing two periods, and they as well as I will be busy with the many possible distractions. I probably could not help but feel sorry for the girl (no matter how much she loves to speak in public) who will be standing in front of half the middle school and thinking they are paying attention, when indeed they may be looking at the person next to them while they pass little notes. This is what I consider brave of her. I may be completely wrong (not probable) but I know that there will be at least one person in the audience (probably a teacher or maybe my mom who is coming) who will be listing to her and understand how courageous and significant these people during World War II who saved Jews actually are. They were a form of stopping a little evil or at least making a stand against it.
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