Holocaust Museum

Yesterday, I went to the United States National Holocaust Museum. It was by far the most depressing and disturbing museum that I had ever seen. It probably also had the most of an effect on me. Walking through displays and exhibits that show the history building up to such an event and the propaganda tactics that were used to convince people to go along with the anti-Semitism and the eventual extermination of millions of people. It was hard to walk through the main exhibit, viewing all of the disturbing pictures on the walls and small trinkets in display cases. As you moved forward it became even more difficult to comprehend the atrocity of these heinous acts, displays of the concentration and death camps, walking through a cattle car that had been used and where people had died, parts of streets and walls from ghettos were millions of Jews were thrown in and forced to stay until they were transferred to hard labor and the inevitability of death. It was at one of the final stops were many patrons of the museum became the most distraught and upset, walking though actual bunks that were in a labor camp, seeing all of the items on display such as uniforms and rusted bowls they were forced to eat from. At the collections of items that had been put on display, the shoes collected, the eye glasses, the silverware, the toys that had all been taken away from the prisoners before killing them, some people around me broke down in tears, the realization that all of these items belonged to people with lives that were cut short, some of them children became too much to handle. There were a few displays that were pictures and videos shown on monitors that were harder to reach in order to try and prevent small children from seeing the heinous and disturbing acts. These acts were of the shaving, disrobing, murder, and cremation of hundreds of people, the mass graves they were thrown in, the black smoke rising from the stacks coming out of the crematorium. It was at the monitors showing the bizarre medical experiments that were performed on people where I heard an individual saying they needed to get away and promptly left. It was very difficult to comprehend the displays in this museum, there is also the feeling as though humanity doomed, not because of just these events, but because similar atrocities have occurred and are occurring in the world. I recommend that people go to this museum, to learn and understand what we don’t always get from history books and classes, to see the pain and hate and to hopefully learn so that we may never repeat anything like this.

SRF