Charlotte's reflection on the evils of Dr. Mengele
While I was researching Dr. Josef Mengele, I learned quite a bit. Not just on the experiments he preformed, or how he hid from the end of WWII to his death. I learned a little bit about myself. I learned how much I can feel for someone who I've never met, and never will meet. Whenever I read about a child who was put through a horrible experiment, I would get filled with pity, and feel so depressed over the poor child's fate. The heaviness of the content I would say was the most difficult part of putting together this wing of the museum. One of the worst things I read about was how much the doctor deceived the children. I read that many loved him, even looked at him as a father figure, as they were taken from their families. What did Josef do in return? He tortured them. He killed them and their siblings. He permanently scarred them with his experiments. "Uncle Mengele ruined the lives of every(falsely) incarcerated prisoner in Auschwitz. Plus to add salt to the wound, Mengele was never prosecuted for his crimes as he hid, like a coward. The experience of finding these artifacts could have been described as both boring and depressing. While it was boring to have to poor over long amounts of texts and websites to find artifacts that I could use, the heavy content was so depressing that one would not be able to finish the research in one or two days. The seriousness of the content made it even harder to write descriptions for the artifacts, because I had to be careful to show respect while writing, especially when writing about the victims. The most surprising fact to me was Mengele's fascination on twins. It struck me as odd as to how hard Mengele tried to change one twin's genes to make them part of the Aryan race while leaving the other twin to mostly suffer only psychological damage. I chose my artifacts in a way that would be able to tell a story. At the beginning we had the introduction of the man, then we had what he did while working at the concentration camp, lastly we went over what happened after WWII. If I were to research more about this topic I would research more about Mengele's life after WWII, I would want to learn more about this so that I could understand why he never surrendered himself, and to learn if he ever regretted his experiments after the fact.