Reflection Questions: Holocaust Video, Chapter 1

1. What details about the Holocaust experience became clearer or more vivid for you because of the video?
-The details about the Jews. How they looked in the concentration camps, how they looked after starving, how they looked when they were dead. They were emaciated. The details about the gas chambers, crematories and the cattle trains. There were thousands of people, men, women and children, shoved into fires and gas chambers. Hundreds of people squished into the cattle trains. The way the SS guards threw the dead bodies into piles.

2. Describe the video techniques used to tell this story:
-Camera angles: They used a variety of shots. They get angles from a birds point of view of the amount of land the concentration camps took over. They get shots from a prisoners point of view in the cattle train. They also did close-up shots of the pictures. The angles are good and its makes it as if you are actually there.
-Graphics: They used old photos of all the people in the camps. They showed a lot of pictures of them without their clothes and how their bones showed. It makes you realize how much the Jews suffered at the concentration camps.
-Interviewing: They talked about the places where Elie Wiesel was taken and where he arrived. They talked about the places where the people were taken to die and also about the amount of people that died. They talked about how he felt when he arrived. They talked about how they chose people to die, and how it didn't matter who you were or what you possessed. It was good and gave a lot for us to think about.
-Excerpts from the book: They used the part where they were on the train on the way to their first camp and how one of the women went mad and kept yelling fire. They used parts where Elie Wiesel and his mother and sisters were separated, not knowing that was the last time he will see them. They used parts of the book to add to what they talked about in the interviews.

3. What is the "madness" that Oprah and Elie Wiesel speak of at the end of this section?
- The madness of all the deaths. They talked about the madness the Germans had to even create camps to kill off an entire race. Elie Wiesel also talked about the madness of surviving and witnessing it. How he doesn't know if he is mad himself.