Holocaust

Today, our class met a Holocaust survivor. He told us about his family and their experiences during the war. I can probably speak for everyone present, that the two hours we spent with him were deeply emotional, for both us and him.
World War II and the Holocaust is a period in human history that is almost unlike anything else. The accounts of people who survived the horrors of World War II, all deserve a book or a movie. Why one might ask. Maybe so that history does not repeat itself -- as it often does.
The story given to us by Thomas Frankl was different from what most of us are used to. Maybe because it had a happy ending, or maybe because Frankl was just a little boy at the time. Thus, we got to see the Holocaust through the eyes of a little boy.
Frankl had a lot of luck during the war, if you could say that. At first his family lost the family business, then they were outed to the authorities that they were Jews. Thus, his family was taken to a train station to be deported to Auschwitz. Frankl's mother, however, managed to get him and his sister out by saying that she was only at the train station to pic up her husband. There the family was separated and Frankl's father and Frankl's grandmother were taken to the camp. Frankl together with his sister and mother hid in a nunnery, if I remember right. There he had to dress as a girl to not call unwanted attention to himself. This way Frankl was able to survive the war. The most beautiful part of the story was how Frankl's father survived Auschwitz and managed to find the family. I think that was a huge amount of luck that the family managed to reconnect after the war.
Listening to Frankl's story was different from any Holocaust story I've listened to or read. His story was a story of a little boy. Thus it involved a couple strong visual images. Also, Frankl remembered the war with his ears. A couple times he used sound to help him tell us his story. Like for example, when he described the night when Germans broke into his home and took them away. He said he still vividly remembers the sound of their boots on the stairs and the guns banging on the door. To help us understand he acted out the sounds, which to me made his story so much more emotional.
Frankl's story is a happy story, even though a lot of his family members died. It is so, because his closest family survived the war and reconnected after the war. It is a miracle that his father survived Auschwitz and managed to get home.