DC: Holocaust Museum

Leah was in town for an orientation training before she goes to Japan for 3 months of funded research for her PhD!  Congrats Leah!!!  It was nice to see a friend - our first one in over a month!  We met up with Leah on Saturday the 5th to check out the Holocaust Memorial Museum.  The museum is so busy that one must stand in line to get a free timed ticket for later in the day.  We were there before 10 a.m. for opening and able to get in by 10:30, but I would highly recommend getting timed tickets in advance online for $1 per ticket.  (I tried to get do this but forgot to print and bring them.  Then later, I realized that I had somehow purchased tickets for the wrong date - June 21st!  Double oops!)

The museum is hard to see, but really amazing.  You are given a passport size booklet which tells a brief true story of a Jew who lived during the holocaust and how they survived or died.  There are 3 floors to walk through full of displays, videos, pictures and audio exhibits.  I think everyone should be required to visit a holocaust memorial sometime in their youth in hopes that all future generations will remember what happened and prevent anything like it from ever happening again. 

Some of the hardest visuals for me were seeing videos of after the liberation when U.S. armies came in and saw the living and the dead.  Some of the living literally looked like moving skeletons who had somehow survived the long and slow starvation.  Another video showed tractors pushing bodies, tangles of bony arms and legs, into mass graves, trying to bury the dead quickly to stop the spread of typhoid and other diseases.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone could treat another human the way the Nazis treated Jews and other minorities.  The many horrors that they were put through are nauseating.

My father's parents were living in Germany during WWII.  Born in 1923, they were both in their teens during the war and my grandfather, Opa, was recruited for the German Army.  He never spoke of what he did or saw during the war even to his wife, but I did hear once from my Oma that he was stationed at a camp in Italy at some point.  I tried to imagine what they went through and experienced on the other side of it all and how they responded.  How would I react if I was a Jew or a German during that time, in that place?

The part I liked best about the museum were the areas where they showed the different ways people fought back.  Germans smuggled guns into one concentration camp and when it was obvious that everyone left at the camp would soon be killed, a resistance among the prisoners broke out.  The Nazis expected to put it down in a few days, but it took over a month.  In other stories, Jews from other countries parachuted in to spy and help form escape routes and resistance.  I was touched by the people who sympathized and aided the Jews at great personal risk to their own lives.

I feel beyond lucky to be living in this time and place.  We not only have our basic needs well met, but so many more luxuries.  It's hard to imagine in our little, blissful corner of the world how terrible life is for people currently living in other areas, warzones, and in poverty.  It pulls me to be more aware of world events and makes me want to be a part of humanitarian missions and donate time and money.  I am so grateful for my life, house, family, food, job, financial stability, a government that allows me all of that and all the excess luxuries as well.

As we walked back to the metro, we passed the Washington Memorial again and stopped for some pictures.