Dowdy 1 Nicole Dowdy Professor Raymond English 1103 26 September 2013 WP #4 My Colorful Relative I chose my grandmother as the most

colorful relative in my family. She has been through so much through out her life, and I knew she would be the best person to talk to for this project. She lives in Venezuela now, but she was born in a concentration camp in Germany during WWII. My grandmother is an adorable, short, and fat person. She wears glasses and is always laughing and dancing when she gets a chance. She has short and dark hair, and a smile that will light up a room. Her name is Sofia, but I call her Abuelita. My Abuelita is one of the strongest women I know. Even though she has been through so much through out her life, she is the happiest person that I know. I knew she would be the best person to talk about this project with because she loves to know all the information of the family. Every time I talk to her it seems like she always knows something new about what is going on inside the family. When I was talking to her about this project, she got very emotional. I had to be careful with the questions that I asked because I did not want to bring up memories that she did not want to remember. When I saw how upset she got when she tried to talk about the Holocaust I knew I had to do my own research first before I could ask her anything else. One thing I did find out though was that my family lost all of their picture, birth certificates, and family items when they were taken from their homes to be sent to

Dowdy 2 a concentration camp. She told me that they would torture her mom and dad when they did not follow the rules of the camp. Another thing that I found out was they day my family was supposed to be burned in the fires an American soldier came and rescued them and many other people that were in this camp. When they escaped they moved to Venezuela, which they still live there today. I did not talk to my grandmother about anything else because she was already upset at this point, and I did not want to ask to many questions on the first time that I talked to her about this project. After I talked with my grandmother about the concentration camps I decided to do some of my own research before I went to talk with my grandmother some more. I found a few websites that seemed to follow some of the information that my grandmother gave me. Some of these websites were: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007387, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/major_camps.html, http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/history-of-the-holocaust-shoah/the-killingmachine/concentration-camps.html. These websites gave me a more detailed description about the concentration camps, and it helped me realize why this subject is so sensitive for my grandmother. My grandmother dealt and saw a lot of horrific things in these camps, and these websites helped me realize that without having to ask her to many questions.