Kenji
Fort Minor (Mike Shinoda)
pages 746-747
Response: "Kenji" was my favorite poem for Freedom and Responsibility because the meaning was clear, it hard a connection to modern society through the style, and because of the point it was bringing. I can really relate to what Shinoda was saying about his family because my dad's parents were both Nederland-natives who were raised through and lived through the Nazi terror that went on in Holland. My grandma, who we called "Oma" which is grandmother in Dutch, had two brothers who were sent to work camps but escaped and had to be hidden. To fight the Nazi's, she and her family even helped other families and political refugees they knew by giving them their ration tickets and even hiding them in their home with her brothers. One story that really gets me is something that happened to my grandma. One day when she was in her early 20s, she was biking to get some groceries and was stopped by a group of German soldiers and told to come to where she saw another crowd of people. In front of the crowd was a covered truck. Out of the truck, soldiers brought two men and a woman in blue coveralls with "Terrorist" painted onto them. One soldier addressed the crowd saying that "this is what will happen to anyone who tries to disrupt our German occupation" The people had been accused of working with the underground, who my Oma also worked with, and were sentenced to die by the Nazi's. My Oma was forced with this other group of people to watch these three people executed by taking a bullet to their heads. The part in the song with the recording of the woman talking about her "innocent neighbors" going to these camps reminded me of all the stories of the innocent people my family knew who became victims of the hateful actions of the Nazis.
