Butterfly Project: Terezin

Terezin

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.

We've suffered here more than enough,
Here in this clot of grief and shame,
Wanting a badge of blindness
 To be a proof for their own children.

A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp
From which any moment might gush forth a spring.

Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way,
Another way,
Not letting you die, not letting you live.

And the cannons don't scream and the guns don't bark
And you don't see blood here.
Nothing, only silent hunger.
Children steal the bread here and ask and ask and ask
And all would wish to sleep, keep silent and just go to sleep again...

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories 

Mif, 1944

I commented on Carter's, Jesse's, Anthony's, Edgar's and Lael's blogs.

Berlin Memorial Activity

What did I learn from this activity? I learned about all the racial discrimination towards Jews in Germany from 1933 - 1945 or Hitler's reign of terror. I learned about all of the laws passed against Jews in German such as having to give in your radio, losing your job due to your race, and giving the German government all your assets. These laws show the discrimination against Jews during Hitler's reign in Germany. You have to feel bad for the Jews as they are seeing everything they worked for in life taken away from them because of racial views of the then German government.
          The reason the monument was built was because they don't want people to forget about the Holocaust. They want people to remember about it and that where they are in the world is one of major places during the Holocaust. The monument was also built to honor those who perished during the Holocaust. They honored the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and many more who died during the Holocaust.
          The number of laws passed during the years varied. One year many laws against the Jews would be passed but in other years few to no laws would be passed. This was to keep the Jewish people living in Germany calm. Hitler may have been a very bad man but he was stupid. He knew that if he passed a ton of laws in one years the Jewish people would go crazy. There would revolution and chaos throughout the streets. So he spread out the laws so that the Jewish people would stay calm and by the time he had passed all the laws he wanted to, it would be too late of the Jewish people to stand up. All their rights would have been taken away already.
          There was a lot of restrictions placed on the Jews from 1933 to 1945 but out of all of restrictions placed the hardest one to follow would being not being able to buy eggs. First of all one of my favorite foods is eggs. Secondly, eggs are used in a lot of foods. The reason the restriction was placed was to make the Jewish people uncomfortable without eggs we wouldn't be able to make so many things. I forgot to mention that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and it is the most important and without eggs what would you be able to eat. You wouldn’t have eggs of course, you also wouldn't have pancakes and or omelettes. You would only have bread and bacon or sausage but if you poor you might not be able to make bacon or sausage meaning you would only be able to eat bread. That isn't how you should start off your day making it very hard for me to follow.

Quarter 2 Reflection Blog

Quarter 2 has come and gone. There have been highs and there have been lows. The Cubs won the World Series and Trump won the election but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how I progressed through the Quarter 2. How I changes and how my grades changed. What I progressed in and what I’m at a stand still with.
    During the school year there has been thing that I have been struggling with. One of those things is paying attention in class. I don’t have a short attention span by all means but when I dose off in class I really can’t help it. You see what I like in my teachers is their ability to teach me in whatever subject they are teaching me. Also whether or not the keep me interested in the subject or not. It is harder for me to pay attention in some class then in others. In Math and I don’t pay a lot of attention because I hate math and I’m confused on most of the stuff that Mr. Jaworsky is telling us. But in Social Studies per say I never doze off but that is because history is one of my favorite subjects especially war history. That is why when I learned that we would be doing a project about the Holocaust in ELA I was excited. The only thing I can really do about not paying attention in class is to thing about my future. Everything I do in 8th grade with be taken into high school. I can’t just doze off in the middle of science class because if I do then that will be taken to high school with me. 8th grade depends on what classes I go to in high school and high school depends on if I go to a good college or not and so on and so forth. I just have to tell myself that if I don’t pay attention in class I will pay for the rest of my life. So I have to make a way to get myself to pay attention in class.
    ELA is one of my favorite classes in school. You just write and write. You let out thoughts that you wouldn't think you’d let out. I’m good at writing and coming into 8th grade from seventh grade that I would be ace and I still was but I was having a bit of trouble. I would have trouble would my writing. I would write some good stuff but I would struggle on structuring my writing but in the second quarter I was doing much better on that aspect. If you look at my Quarter 2 blogs compared to my Quarter 1 blogs you would see a big difference. In my Quarter 2 blogs the structure makes it smooth and not forced while in my Quarter 1 blogs my structure makes the blog looked forced. So I made a big improvement in ELA from Quarter 1 to Quarter 2.
          Since 2017 I have really accomplished a big goal that I have. But one goal I did accomplish was being on a basketball team and completing a season. You see I wasn’t really interested in basketball till the end of 5th grade. Before then I would play once in while if someone asked me to but around the end of 5th grade I had gotten NBA2k13 for my XBOX360. I just played and played the game for hours. I was in love and then I started to basketball in real life. I would challenge my friends to play one on one and practice in my backyard. Then in 6th grade I wanted to join the basketball team but about a month or so before the tryouts I broke my arm stopping me for trying out. Then 7th grade rolled around but I had lost all interest in basketball, I don’t know why and I don’t know how I lost all interest but I did. Then 8th grade came around and I tried out of the All-Star team of course I didn’t make it due to lack of experience and never being on a basketball team before. I wanted to tryout for Intramural but I missed the tryouts due to having to go to the dentist. So the next day I asked Mr. Baldassano if I could join and she said yes and put me on Coach Cory’s team. We went 1-7 but I was a good experience for me and it will help in the future with trying out for the high school basketball team and the Berwyn Rec League.
          Quarter 2 was a good quarter with it’s ups and downs. Hopefully I get good grades on my report card and that Quarter 3 is just as good.

   

Book Talk: 4th of July

     The book I’m going to be talking about today is called 4th of July by James Patterson and it is a mystery book. It takes place in California. The main character is Lieutenant of the police force Lindsay Boxer. She is your average woman. She is has blonde hair and is in her early 30s. She also has a love interest that is in the police force. The story starts with Boxer investigating a murder scene. The murder is similar to others that they had seen in the past couple of months. They find a car that was at every crime scene and they track it down. They open the door of the car and in the car was Sara and Sam Cabot son and daughter of their prime suspect Dr. Cabot.  The kids were crying a river and Boxer and her partner Jacobi were going to let them off the hook when Sara pulled out a gun and shot both of them. After she was shot Boxer pulled out her gun in self defense and shot Sara and Sam killing Sara and paralyzingly Sam. Due to that Dr. Cabot sued Boxer for wrongful death and the media is eating it up calling a murder and child killer. She has to overcome the trial and clear her name of the killings. The mood of the book changes depending on the scene. It could be disturbing, sad, happy, melancholy, or intense. Their isn’t just one mood to describe the entire book. The theme of the book would be Man vs. Society or in this case Woman vs. Society. Boxer is being demolished by the media and is trying to hold herself in court and her lawyers aren’t really helping making it one versus all.
     4th of July is a great book and I haven’t even finished it. I like the book because it is so out of the box. I have never seen or read a book about this. This book to me at least is different from anything I have ever read. I also like this book because it is interesting. You also don't know what is going to happen even if you think you know what's going to happen the book will throw a curveball at you. I would recommend this book because of how the story is. It is a story you may have never heard in a book before and it is interesting. The book will keep you interested in the story. You also won’t know what is going to happen. In my opinion 4th of July is great book and you should go out and read it.

“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” By Lazar Stevlic

     Human Rights came about in late 1948. They were created to give people rights that can never be taken away from you because you are a human. One of those human rights was “No Torture.” It states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” but some people have this right violated. People in Syria, and Guantanamo Bay are being tortured everyday. Which makes it feel to those people that they have no human rights. 141 countries still use torture according to the U.N. It is also happening a lot right now due to wars that are happening right now. There is torture happening even on our own soil in America. But people don’t care. The Red Cross made a poll about torture. According to the poll 46% of Americans think that torture is acceptable. But it really isn’t acceptable. As a human you have rights that you get for being human. One of those rights is the right to not be tortured. But many countries and Americans don’t care.
     During the Syrian Civil War the Syrian government have been doing everything to stop the rebels. A Syrian woman by the name of Farah was arrested by the Syrian Government and tortured. For this she was interviewed by the BBC (British Broadcasting Station) because of what happened to her and they wanted to share her story. She was arrested because they thought that she was a opposition activist a.k.a a rebel but she wasn’t. The first thing she saw were men hanged up. She was put in a dark, cold room with 12 other women. She was beaten as they asked her questions. She also tortured with electrodes. She was also threatened with rape by the guards and the interrogators. They tortured her physically and mentally. They also threatened to bring her son into the detention center. Hurting her inside even more. Farah and other people in the detention center were being tortured on a daily basis. The guards didn't care who they tortured as she said that a elderly man got tortured once. She said that they electrocuted him and he died during the torture. So they picked his body up from the ground and threw him out of the room. She also has seen a man being hung from his hands and legs. They pulled the ropes and spit on him. After 36 days of cruel, and endless torture they released her from prison and she went to the UK. She holds Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responsible from the torture and events she witnessed in the prison. Due to the torture and things she witness she will probably be scarred of life.
      There could be life long effects on Farah’s life due to the torture. She can develop PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) due to the torture she went though and the events she witnessed in the prison. Another man who was tortured named Adeel suffers from panic attacks due to the torture. Whenever he hears footsteps approaching him or a person in uniform it triggers bad memories and he gets a panic attack. He was tortured in Guantanamo Bay by US soldiers. Adeel also feels like he is still in Guantanamo Bay and he also feels isolated due to his torture. A psychiatrist at King’s College London said that the techniques that they use in torture are “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”
     Torture isn’t a thing that some countries want to stop like the Syria and 46% of American citizens. They use torture to get inform from Prisoners of War. Syria and some Americans don’t think that there are other ways to get information of people. Plus they should stop because it violates a human right. Human Right number 5, “No Torture” but some countries are trying to put an end to torture. Barack Obama has been trying closed Guantanamo Bay where the Americans had been torturing prisoners. He also banned the use of brutal interrogation techniques being used by American troops. Due to Obama trying to stop the use of torture in the US other countries could be soon to follow signaling the end of torture for good.

Human Rights Tortue Blog

On December 5th 2016, The Red Cross opened up a poll about torture. They opened the poll to see what Americans thought about torture. The poll had one simple question is torture okay or not. Well 46% of Americans say that torture is acceptable. Which is a big human right violation. Human Rights are right that you have as a human being. One of your human rights is “No Torture”. Which states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. 46% of Americans disregard this human right and say that torture is acceptable. 33% of Americans also say that torture is “a part of war”. Meaning that if US Army takes a POW then they could torture that prisoner to give them information about their enemies. Meaning that the US Army could violate human rights due to them being in a war.
     But not all is bad. In the same poll 54% of Americans find that torture is wrong. Meaning that these people have educated themselves about these things. They also know that torture is a human right violation. But not all things are good. The Red Cross poll also showed that the poll was a lower proportion than any other country polled. Israel had 44% of people said that torture is acceptable and Palestine had 35% of people say that torture is acceptable. Meaning that we have the most percent of people that say that torture is an acceptable than any other country in the world.

Nonfiction Blog: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The book I'm reading is about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What I read recently was leading up to the bombing and what happened during and after the bombing. It talked about the beginning of WW2 and how the entire world was in total war.  The author talked about the battles and things that happened leading up to the bombing. By 1945 the Japanese were locked in a war with the US. The Japanese saw surrender as dishonorable and fought with their life for the glory of Japan. On March 10th, 1945, 300 American aircraft dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs. Damaging almost every city. Despite this the Japanese never surrendered. The prepared a final battle and taught their citizens how to fight and gave them weapons. But America was working on the Manhattan Project which gave them nuclear weapons. FDR didn't use them but he suddenly died and his successor Harry Truman was ready to use it to end WW2. Then on 7:09 a.m. on Monday, August 6th, 1945 Hiroshima was bombed by the atomic bomb killing 100,000 people. Many were injured by burns and everything was destroyed. Even after that bombing on Hiroshima the Japanese still didn't surrender. It wasn't till they nuked Nagasaki that the Japanese would surrender ending WW2.
     “In 1939, German-born physicist Albert Einstein-who had moved to the U.S. because of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany-had written a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, warning that the Germans had successfully split an atom of element uranium, a breakthrough that could potentially lead to the development of incredibly powerful atomic bombs”. I found this passage interesting because I wonder why the Germans were trying to do that in the first place, were they trying to make a weapon that could completely destroy their enemies. I found this interesting because the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused important events after the war was over and into our lifetime. The “Cold War” started because of the atomic bomb. The Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Iran Nuclear Deal and I see things like that happen and I wonder what would have our world look like without nuclear weapons.
     I have one thing that I found interesting and I will probably never forget this. When the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 100,000 people died because of the atomic bomb. Then the Japanese didn't surrender so the US bombed Nagasaki. Then the Japanese surrendered. The US citizens were celebrating. But they were celebrating the deaths for innocent people. Babies, mothers, grandmothers, fathers all perished in the bombings but the US won. So people overlook that fact. That the way we won WW2 was because of the death of 100,000 plus innocent people.

I commented on Anthony's blog
I commented on Jesse's blog
I commented on Edgar's blog