20th Century Blog

On May 4, 1970 the National Guard fired at a crowed of students at Kent State University in Ohio. The shooting was very dramatic, killing four and wounded nine students. The shootings began symbolize the political and social division that divided the country during the Vietnam era. General Canterbury of the National Guard is the one who made the decision to order the demonstrators to disperse. The students of the university soon found them self trapped on the football field.

The guardsmen fire into a crowed of unharmed collage students. The guardsmen fired in self defense and that shooting was justified but they also were not in immediate danger and therefore the shooting at Kent State University was unjustified. The families of the wounded and the killed students were provided money by the state and not by the guardsmen’s. The guards were viewed by the “declaration of regret” but it’s not an apology or admission for doing wrong.

After the shooting of Kent State University the debate still remains on whether the guardsmen were in danger and that’s why they opened fire. The 13 seconds that ended in four deaths and nine wounded and it could have ended in an even a more tragic and bloody confrontation. Kent state university was ordered to close by its first president Robert White and then by portage county prosecutor Ronald Kane. Classes did not resume until the summer of 1970. The faculty engaged in wide Variety of activity and through the mall of off campus meeting for the students to finish the semester.

It’s 1943, it’s dark and gloomy. I’m in a room that isn’t big at all. My wife and 9 year old son are behind me sleeping, the others are dead. From what? I don’t know. It could be from not eating because we have no food. It could be from diseases. The food we do get we share. We barely get by but we try to make it work.

I don’t know how many days we’ve been in here. I don’t know how many days we can stay alive either. We might have to eat what’s left of the ones who passed away just to stay alive. We used to be a happy family that lived in a nice home with heat and cold when we needed it. But not anymore, NO! not anymore. We have nothing now, not even air. We have to ask to breathe too. Oh no, I have to go; I think I hear a guard coming.

The German army dropped me off at this camp about 3 months ago. Every day there are new people at this camp. This is sad to say but people die in this camp every day. The Germans kill us in different ways; it’s horrible. They don’t really give us any space to sleep mainly because the camp is so overpopulated. I am also very depressed about not seeing my wife and kid’s. They separated all the men, women, and children.
I do get fed in the camp, but it is not that good. There are not great amounts of food to be passed to all of us. That makes it very hard on me especially because I am old, and have to work very hard. Everybody in the camp is very skinny except for the people who are new. Even though this camp is killing me I want to make it through the day. The reason why is so that one day I can see my wife and Children.

Hi I’m the tall man in the picture. I have been here for a long time. Life is hard on me. I have to work and I get beat up a lot. I get to eat maybe once a week. I barely get anything to drink. The place around here smells like dead carcass. People have a bunch of diseases. If I don’t do what I’m told I will get killed? I will be whipped.
Some of my family was killed for not doing they were told what to do. Some of my family is still here. I have not seen any of my family for a year or so. I have been in trouble a lot but I’m a hard worker.

I do not know how long I have been here. It feels likes years. My muscles have grown frail and weak from lack of food and rest. The toxic air that is made from the fallen poisons our bodies further, allowing us to join them sooner and sooner. They cramp us so closely together it’s amazing that any body is still alive, let alone me. I have not seen my family since I’ve arrived. I do not know what has befallen them. Were they able to somehow to escape from those demons in human skin the people calls Nazis? Or were they suffering the same fate as me?
Dear god, how I long to see my little girl, my little boy, and my beautiful wife. My body is starting to eat itself, inside out. Could they really be going through what I am? Could the Devil who rules that army of demons possible be the ruler of Hell himself!? Such a cold hearted man who laughs in secret as we are being pressed further and further into Hell by his unfathomable hands, stained red with the bloody cries of those who have fallen?
What can we do? As we speak, I myself am hardly able to stay alive. I do not know what to do. I apologize if my paper is damp for the tears of those who have lost so much and are poor, as well as gods tears as the rain leaks through the cracks on the roof. Somehow, I cannot help but smile. In these times, my body is near its death, my bones are aching and my muscles are eating themselves. But as the tears of god pours down on us, I know he has not forsaken us. I think about the souls of those who have fallen, the cries of the children, and the sorrow of those who wish us well. If only that was enough though.
It looks like this will by my last sight. My body is starting to end. As we speak, it is taking everything I have left to finish this letter. To those who may read it in the future, even though I am burning with pain and almost to weak to move. I cannot help but smile. My time in Hell is finally done. I can finally be at peace, with the ones I care about. So as I write this last sentence, I bid you farewell. To those who have died here, please allow me to join you. For I shall be able to see my family once again. Do not forget those who have fallen.

This is me on the right I have been here for about 6 months. The person next to me is a kid I knew a long time ago but we meet back up here at this concentration camp. He has only been here for 3 months but he is younger than me. It is being really hard on him as it is for all of us. We don’t really know what is going on here. The Germans brought us here saying it was a work camp. They took all of our stuff that had any value. Then they put us in these little rooms and we have just been staying here ever since they don’t tell us anything. I see someone die just about everyday now this place is a horror story. Its like something you would read in a book. I have seen some of the nicest and older people I know just be killing for nothing I have seen little kids starving to death. People are going crazy in here. People try to get out but we are all to weak to do anything. They give us some food and drinks. Just look at me and you can tell how little they have giving me to eat. All I want to do is get out of here and go see my wife and my two little girls. I have not seen them in over a year I don’t really remember what they look like. Its starting to get really hard for me to get up in the morning but I do because think I am going to get out of here one day I don’t really know if I will ever get out of here or if to day is going to be the day the pick me to kill. As each day goes bye it gets harder and harder every night I stay up crying just think is tonight my last night but hope I get one more day in me.

These are just some of the people we had to kill during the holocaust. I was part of the Nazis with Hitler and the crew because if I didn’t join I would have died. I had to do a lot of work during the war. I had to kill a lot of innocent people. During the holocaust I tortured people it was part of joining the army with Hitler.

I killed a lot of innocent people during the holocaust. I didn’t enjoy killing all of them but I had no choice. If I didn’t I would have died along with them and I don’t want that. This was one of the concentration camps I worked at. It was called Trzebnia. It hurt me a lot when I killed all those poor people. I also lit people on fire sometimes when we were told to burn them to death. This was one of the most crazy jobs I have ever had to do.

My name is Annelies Marie Frank. I was one of the million Jewish children who died in the holocaust and this is my story. I lived with my parents and my older sister Margot. We lived in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. In 1934, my father Otto Frank left us to go to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. My father had business connections. Mom and sister followed my father but I stayed with my grandparents in Aachen. I arrived to be with my family in February 1934.

It was the first half of July when my family and I went into hiding. We had a secret room that was located behind a book shelf. Four Dutch Jews were in that room, there names were Hermann, Auguste, and Peter Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer. For two long years we lived in this secret attic. In my spare time I wrote in my diary like ever girl does. I wrote about everything that was going on and how my day went. A friend of ours would get clothes and food for us. That was a huge risk for everybody. Suddenly on August 4, 1944 the Gestapo (German Secret State police) had discovered the hiding place, Some anonymous Dutch caller gave us up.

The holocaust was the systematic state sponsored persecution and murder around six million Jews by the Nazis regime and its collaborators. The Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire”. In 1933 the Nazis who took power in Germany believed Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews deemed “inferior” were an alien threat to the so called German racial community.

The final few months of the war the SS guards migrated camp inmates by train or with forced marches, also called “death marches” in the attempt to prevent the Allies liberation of large numbers of prisoners. They did not stop the marched until May 7 1945.

The year is 1944. The war in Germany was very intense. I am an American soldier. We have seen thousands of horrible things. We have seen stuff that we didn’t expect to see. American soldiers fought in Germany for about two years before the war began coming to an end. We moved from town to town clearing homes and the streets of German Nazis. About 300,000 German soldiers surrendered and were captured.

After years of fighting and the war coming to an end, we were just sent on patrol duty to scout the land for things we missed. As you see in the picture above we missed stuff like this the first time around. In this picture there are a bunch of captured Jews that didn’t make through the of war. We were on patrol we came across these camps. These camps are being called German concentration camps which held the Jews. The people were starved and weak with no hope of living; it is just sickening. As American soldiers we did what we could to help these prisoners by giving them food, water and clothing. After stumbling across something like this we knew that fighting this war was right.

I am a Army soldier from the U.S. . One day on patrol we came across a work camp. There were no soldiers in the camp. There were a lot of Jews still there. They were slowly dying from starvation.
We went to help and to look around. I went in this building it was dark and had a odor to it. I stumbled into a room with an oven. The oven door was slightly ajar so I opened it. To my horror, there was a body in there. The smell was unbearably. I looked as if they were burning the bodies because there were too many to bury. That is how I got this picture.

Interviewing Eliezer ‘Elie’ Wiesel, a living holocaust survivor from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and understanding the misery he went through.

Can you tell us about yourself?

Elie said he is a Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. Mr. Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity soon after he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace. The Foundation's mission, rooted in the memory of the Holocaust, is to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality.

Can you tell us about your time during World War II?

In 1944 Elie, his family and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street. On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian authorities allowed the German army to deport the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz Birkenau. While at Auschwitz, his inmate number, "A-7713", was tattooed onto his left arm. Wiesel was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have died at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a sub camp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for over eight months as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between three concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 29, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald; Wiesel's father died from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the crematorium, only months before the camp was liberated by the American Third Army on April 11. His total time spent in concentration camps was less than eleven months..

I am the one lying down on the second shelf. And I am the one on the right the way to the right. My head is so heavy I have to prop it up. When I got here I was 17 years old and I was with my dad and my uncle. Over the years I have seen a lot of brutal things at the camp. I have seen people die out in the fields and I still have that image in my head. Then when I go to bed I just think of all the people that are dying0 and worry about my dad and my uncle. I have not seen them in several months. I have no idea where my mom and my brother are at.
The image in my head is just brutal. I lost all of my friends that I use to bunk with and they died in the bunk. I had my friend in my hands while he was dying. In the morning I wake up and see less people in camp.. People are dying every which way one day I tried to find them but I heard the guards grabbed them. I thought for a while that they were died and one day I found out that they both had died. Since I am now alone, no family and not much to live for, I will never act the same. You might ask about my dad and my uncle.

The WPA was around in the 1930. They helped find job for a lot of people. There was 10, 0000 unemployed people. They started to pay those people. They were paid about 50.00 a month for the work that they did. There was some rough time back in the day. They had to live on very low amount of money. They built a lot of stuff back in the day.

They built a bunch of trails. They built 1634 news school. They got paid very little for the work that they did. They build 105 new airports. They build 3000 new tennis courts. They build 3300 new storage dams for the people. They also build 103 new golf courses. And they also build 5800 mobile libraries. They built a lot of stuff that we still have today.