The Holocaust

The Holocaust Museum was amazing yesterday. As sad as it is, the museum is something I think everybody needs to see. The whole time I was there I kept thinking about the movie "La Vita e Bella" with Roberto Berninni about an Italian Jew who gets taken with his son to a concentration camp, one of my favorite movies. My favorite part was the first quote on the wall that you see when you walk off the elevator, Eisenhower pretty much predicted that one day people would say it was all propaganda and that this never happened. The quote said that he went to the concentration camps purposely so that if ever people questioned these events, he saw them with his own eyes. The hardest thing for me to do was walk through one of the train cars that carried all of the people off to the concentration camps. The sign next to it said that hundreds and hundreds of people were packed into the cars with many children and elderly dieing before reaching the camps. I had to walk around the train car, I stepped inside and couldnt imagine the amount of people who died in that exact car. The were videos playing of the different medical experiments the Germans put the Jews through to see how long a pilot could last without oxygen and other things like that. The other part that was hard for me was the area with the shoes. Once the people were stripped of all clothing and possessions, the women and children were sent to the gas chambers. The shoes of all of those individuals were piled into one room and it was so hard to look at the childrens' shoes and the high heels of the women. At the very end there is a place that explains what happened to the Jewish population in each country. The Danish smuggled people over the border in boats, Musselini refused to give up the Jews but then after so many years was forced to anyway, etc. The very last thing you see is a video of survivors and one quote I will never forget was from a woman speaking about this museum: "For all of those who come here remember, these items are prescious, even if it is just a small shoe, it is our prescious things."
This is something absolutely everyone needs to see!!!!
Joanna