Holocaust Museum field trip
On Tuesday, our Ferrum College class piled onto a tour bus that drove us to DC to spend the day at the Holocaust Museum. Since that visit, I have been processing what I saw, what I experienced, what I felt.
As a visual person, I often translate what I read or think about into pictures in my mind. This was not necessary in the HM. When it was designed, they chose a documentary film director to help make it a strong reminder to everyone not to let such an atrocity occur again. There was also much concern that there are people who deny the Holocaust ever even happened at all, so every piece had to be authentic. If it was duplicated, such as a casting being made of Jewish cemetery headstones that stretched across one entire wall, this was identified with a placque as a casting.
Consequently, the power of each display is incredible. You walk through an actual cattle car, one that transported victims to a killing camp. Battered old suitcases are piled outside that car, evidence that the victims thought they would be able to use items inside those cases. There is a huge pile of the actual shoes worn by the victims that had been discarded when they entered what they thought were showers, but in fact were large rooms soon filled with the killing gas. Containers of pellets were there. The gas ovens of a crematory were also there, solid and frightening.
One display, very dramatic, is printed on the HM postcard. It is a towering three-story high room, going way up to a skylight from the floor on every side, illuminating 6000 color and sepia-toned portraits of everyone in a small Lithuanian town, babies, children, loving couples, grandparents...who nearly all died (there were only 29 survivors) in the Holocaust. A survivor whose grandfather had been the town's photographer collected the pictures. The Nazis had rounded up between 4,000 and 4,500 of the town's Jewish citizens, and brought in others from a nearby town, putting them into three small buildings with no food or water for 3 days. Then they first took the men to the nearest Jewish cemetery and shot them; next, they took the women and children and killed them, dragging their bodies into a mass grave and burning them.
An elevator takes the visitor up to the 4th floor, where video of Hitler and his thugs begin the journey. Winding down each floor, with directional signage, the cattle car, clothing of actual victims, newspapers from around the world that appeared at first to take the Nazi propaganda as fact...even in the US. In fact, the US turned away a ship full of more than 900 Jewish people trying to escape the Nazi's, something I never knew.
Your heart breaks as you identify with the victims, with the scarred survivors. There's a 2-hour video of some of the survivors telling about their particular ordeal, and you wonder how they ever got through it. Jewish, gypsies (Roma), Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, other disabled individuals. Deliberately destroyed. They even cut off the women's hair and sold it as mattress stuffing material! There are pictures of the piles of hair, but there was a dispute at the museum about having the actual hair there, as it was perceived as not honoring the victims.
There's a virtual tour available at the museum's website. I plan to use it, for the pieces I missed during our visit.
The overall message is: Remember
http://www.ushmm.org/
As a visual person, I often translate what I read or think about into pictures in my mind. This was not necessary in the HM. When it was designed, they chose a documentary film director to help make it a strong reminder to everyone not to let such an atrocity occur again. There was also much concern that there are people who deny the Holocaust ever even happened at all, so every piece had to be authentic. If it was duplicated, such as a casting being made of Jewish cemetery headstones that stretched across one entire wall, this was identified with a placque as a casting.
Consequently, the power of each display is incredible. You walk through an actual cattle car, one that transported victims to a killing camp. Battered old suitcases are piled outside that car, evidence that the victims thought they would be able to use items inside those cases. There is a huge pile of the actual shoes worn by the victims that had been discarded when they entered what they thought were showers, but in fact were large rooms soon filled with the killing gas. Containers of pellets were there. The gas ovens of a crematory were also there, solid and frightening.
One display, very dramatic, is printed on the HM postcard. It is a towering three-story high room, going way up to a skylight from the floor on every side, illuminating 6000 color and sepia-toned portraits of everyone in a small Lithuanian town, babies, children, loving couples, grandparents...who nearly all died (there were only 29 survivors) in the Holocaust. A survivor whose grandfather had been the town's photographer collected the pictures. The Nazis had rounded up between 4,000 and 4,500 of the town's Jewish citizens, and brought in others from a nearby town, putting them into three small buildings with no food or water for 3 days. Then they first took the men to the nearest Jewish cemetery and shot them; next, they took the women and children and killed them, dragging their bodies into a mass grave and burning them.
An elevator takes the visitor up to the 4th floor, where video of Hitler and his thugs begin the journey. Winding down each floor, with directional signage, the cattle car, clothing of actual victims, newspapers from around the world that appeared at first to take the Nazi propaganda as fact...even in the US. In fact, the US turned away a ship full of more than 900 Jewish people trying to escape the Nazi's, something I never knew.
Your heart breaks as you identify with the victims, with the scarred survivors. There's a 2-hour video of some of the survivors telling about their particular ordeal, and you wonder how they ever got through it. Jewish, gypsies (Roma), Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, other disabled individuals. Deliberately destroyed. They even cut off the women's hair and sold it as mattress stuffing material! There are pictures of the piles of hair, but there was a dispute at the museum about having the actual hair there, as it was perceived as not honoring the victims.
There's a virtual tour available at the museum's website. I plan to use it, for the pieces I missed during our visit.
The overall message is: Remember
http://www.ushmm.org/
posted by Marion | 6:00 PM
3 Comments:
Remembering history, especially such tragic history, gives a little meaning to this terrible event. Thank you for carrying the torch!
I find it hard to believe that people can a) say the Holocaust never happened - and I know there are plenty who do and b) that already most of us seem to have forgotten about it and perpetrate exactly the same sorts of atrocities in the here and now.
I was fortunate to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial/Musuem in Jerusalem some years ago - like you I was gutted by what I saw and the feelings evoked. This is stuff we need to remember - yet we don't. It begs the question, what on earth is wrong with us that we allow history to constantly repeat itself in places like Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq, the Congo, Serbia... Have we learned absolutely nothing?
Vanilla, There are people who deny, people who forget, and those who just do not want to ever think about it.
I was encouraged by a very long line of high school students waiting to enter the museum the day I was there. It reached down the steps, across the plateau, down some more steps and all the way to the barriers at the curb. Barriers. Those were everywhere in DC. We went through heavy security much like at the airport but with more guards, and even went through security and guards at the museum coffee shop. Our world has changed.
But prejudice and discrimination, and antiSemitism, live on.
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