CAPS #2- Dani Wingard

"We experience everything in the world not 'as it is'--because there is no way that we can know the world 'as it is'--but only as the world comes to us through out sensory receptors. From there, these stimuli go instantly into the 'date-storage banks' of our brains, where they have to pass through the filters of our censor screen, our decoding mechanism, and the collectivity of everything we have learned from the day we were born" (Martin & Nakayama 2013).

I never thought about the fact that our own personal histories reflect who we are as people. Everyone has their own history or histories and it's our job to understand the underlying meaning. It takes time to figure out where a person comes from, but it's something that should be learned. Family histories relate directly to this quote because it is defined as histories that are not written down but are passed along orally from one generation to the next. I think that it helps to explain the quote because we truly can't take the world as it is, we can only accept it by how we view it.

For the cultural reporter blog I want to study a family that isn't a traditional family like the one that I'm apart of. When I learned about Family histories in the textbook it got me thinking about stories that have been passed down through my family. No one in my family was apart of the Holocaust, but they did live during that time. None of them fought in the war, but they were alive during that time. For whatever reason I find the Holocaust very intriguing and it makes me want to understand it more. Now finding Holocaust survivors to talk to is kind of hard, but I did find a story that really caught my attention. Holocaust survivor Soloman Radasky tells a story about how he spent nine weeks in Majdanek. His story is about how he spent nine weeks in the same clothes and he never once washed his face. If they tried to wash their face they would have to go outside where the Ukrainians had half inch pipes that they would use to hit them over the head with. He said that people would drop dead every day because they went to wash their face. The last line of the story is about Soloman saying he finally made it to Auschwitz. He finally got to wash his face and put on new, clean clothes, but he said to himself, "God is still with me." I think that that last line is so powerful because the people who lived through the Holocaust had to have something to keep them going. The thing that kept Soloman going was his faith in God.

Where do we go from here? Well I think the only thing we can do from here is try to understand. Try to understand where people come from. If we can understand their histories then we will better understand why they are who they are. A person's history tells a lot about them I've come to learn because it's those past events that have shaped them into who they are and will be for the rest of their lives. I think that if we can find those absent histories and make them known then we will better understand human beings.

References
http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/data.show.php?di=record&da=recordings&ke=37