I've thought, and thought about resistance in the Holocaust and I've come to this realization: No words or poem or detailed description can describe the level of terror and oppression that took place. I am simply going to try my best to understand a fraction of the pain that many people went through, and the lessons we can learn from what happened.

If the people that died in the Holocaust had one thing to say, I think that they would say, "Life is a gift, and you're lucky to have it, don't waste it, because before you even know it, it won't be a free gift anymore." The oppressed Jews went to their physical and mental limit just to avoid death. Therefore, if we do not live our lives to the most passionate way we know how, then we are wasting the extremely valuable gift of life. I don't think it's fair to waste our life, because many people worked a lot harder than us to have life, while they were not able to have it. So by not living our lives to the fullest we are cheating them. Our lives are very short, and refusing to live them to the fullest makes them even shorter. Furthermore, we as a society must do our best, to keep people from stealing other people's lives. If life is not protected than we are giving in to death, which is the very thing the Jews fought to avoid. By not taking a stand against those who cheat others out of their life we are in fact causing death. I don't remember who said it, but I'll always remember the quote, "Whoever forgets the past, is doomed to repeat it." If our society does not remember the suffering of the Jews, we could be sentencing ourselves to the same pain.

Finally, I know that the only way to fully live life is to have life eternally through Jesus Christ. Holocaust is defined as, "the wholesale destruction and loss of life." Ultimately we will all face our own holocaust, because I know that I will someday die. Yet just as Americans came to the rescue of the Jews, Jesus Christ came to rescue me when he died for me. He lived through his own holocaust so that I won't have to. If we simply trust that Jesus will save us from death, just as the Jews believed that someone would rescue them from death, we can have true eternal life with God forever in heaven. This trust is the ultimate resistance against the loss of life, or the holocaust.

Bibliography

Klein, Gerta Weissmann, One Survivor Remembers. HBO, 1996.

Schindler's List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. With Lia Neeson and Ben Kingsley. Universal 1994.