Reflection Questions: Holocaust Video, Chapter 2-3

1. They visit the gas chambers and Elie Wiesel describes what everything is and how they killed so many people at once. They also visited the infirmary where doctors did experiments on patients and the brick wall where people were executed everyday. Also they visited the museums where they show peoples belongings from that time like the suitcases and shoes.

2. Its called a death factory because it was producing dead Jews. Most of the people worked to death or were killed in the gas chambers. It was industrialized because they killed so many people everyday like a machine and they had a process to it and made it a regular and constant thing.

3. The labelled suitcase symbolize all the Jews came with, their lives were in their suitcases and it was taken from them. The baby clothes shows that they had no mercy and killed even babies and children. The numerous shoes show how many people were owned by each pair and how many of the shoes owners are just dead.

4. This movie was shot in winter to give a somber feeling to the movie, the interviews were slow and there were many pauses, which you don't see in a lot of movies. It was effective because it gave time for all the words to sink in and give you a real idea of what the Holocaust was like.

5. The book and the movie didn't have as much of an impact on me as I would have thought because I have watched many accounts of the Holocaust and had a good understanding of the genocide but I've never seen an actual surviver give a tour of the camps. Everything culminated just makes me think and try to imagine how anyone could torture a person with no remorse and continue taking hundreds of lives everyday. Although the book paints a vivid picture in your head of what the Holocaust was like, the movie shows the physical places where the events happened. Even so, I think the book had more of an impact on me because it wasn't like a documentary where you interview people and get b-roll of the places but it shares an actual specific account of everything Elie Wiesel experienced during the Holocaust.

Reflection Questions: Holocaust Video, Chapter 1

1. The living conditions like the places they slept in and worked in. Something that became clearer where the beds because there weren't mattress' or anything it was just an area to sleep in. When they've been beaten and working so hard all day the one thing that might give them hope is sleep and they couldn't even do that in a decent bed, especially because there were lots of men to a single bed.

2. Some camera angles that were often used were ariel shots and wide angled shots to show the immense size of the camps. Also I think the pictures taken during the Holocaust mixed in with the modern footage was used to make it seem more realistic that certain events happened in the places they were shooting.

3. The madness Oprah and Elie Wiesel are referring is the fact that in that kind of environment you start to develop a feeling that its normal for people to die everyday right infront of you, it became more normal to die then to live.