Ever since I learned about the Holocaust in the third grade, I found myself obsessing over the question, "Would I have survived?"There may have been many things that attributed to this odd obsession of mine:

1. Making the history personal. I had family that died in the holocaust, and my parents found it very important to make sure I was well versed on the topic. Which included many visits to many museums. If you have ever visited a Holocaust museum before, many give you a card of a person at the beginning of the tour and at the end you find out if your person lived or died.

2. The more I learned the more I wanted to learn. I began to read every Holocaust novel I could, watch every movie, visit every Museum, (Including in Israel, Washington DC, New York, and LA)and take many classes in college about the topic as well.

3. This may have also come from the idea of making sure that this horrible series of events never happened again, or just maybe out of pure HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?

When I found out I had diabetes this changed my thoughts entirely! There is no way I would have survived as a type 1! Before, I had these plans of how I would had survived-running away, hiding, staying strong...but now I depend on so much to keep my alive and well! Already the prisoners were treated so horribly, there is no way a diabetic would survive over a week.

The Nazi's were ruthless! They just killed handicapped people and performed horrible scientific experiments on them...why wouldn't that happen to a type 1? All of their belongings were taken from them, so wouldn't the insulin been taken away too? If the Nazi's goal was to kill, wouldn't they not care if a prisoner had their insulin or not? Again my brain goes on a wild goose chase of WHAT IF? Over and over again...

As many of you know, I am newer to this community and to my amazement I came across a post from dLife about Ernest Sterzer. He is the only known type 1 diabetic survivor of the horrible Nazi Concentration Camps.

You can download the story here as a PDF. It is short, powerful and WELL worth reading.

Surviving the Holocaust at all was so rare and amazing, but WITH TYPE 1 DIABETES it must have been impossible! This story really blew me away. I think now when I am having a tough day with diabetes, I might remember that Ernest had it much worse than me.

I can't find much more information on Ernest, so if anyone knows anymore I would LOVE to learn as much as possible about him. It is so important to educate ourselves in this world. We need to educate so bad things don't happen again. Weather you notice a low trend every night a group of being being oppressed, we must take notice and action!

Education, as I have discussed earlier IS SO IMPORTANT.

I leave you today, with a picture of my plant that is growing beautifully. No growth on the other two still.