So as all my blog followers know our gifted and talented class has been studying hope, humanity and the human spirit. A while ago our teachers suggested that we look at tragedies in which the human spirit triumphed in order to learn the strength of the human spirit. In my opinion one of the worst human tragedies of all time was the Holocaust,(which if you don;t know was the mass killing of over 12 million people in Europe, primarily Germany advocated by Adolf Hitler and certain members of the Nazi party) so our class took a trip to the United Stated National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC last Friday.
I had been dreading because the Holocaust always makes me feel horrible. I feel ashamed that I belong to the human race that produced someone so willing to annihilate billions of people and even more ashamed of a human race that sat by and watched the tragedy happen and didn't intervene until it was more or less too late. I was also dreading the trip because I hate seeing the emaciated bodies and sunken in eyes, and living skeletons with skin on them. I feel sick looking at the pictures of dying orphans with no food or shelter, and the hopeless looks in the concentration camp victim's eyes, and even sicker when I realize theres absolutely nothing I can do to change history.
So what I expected to see before going into the museum was just pictures and videos of basically everything I already knew. I thought because I've studied it so much that I knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust..and I was wrong on so many levels(no pun intended each level of the museum taught me something knew). Not only did the museum inform but it also was made in such a way that makes you as an individual feel connected with the museum.
When we first arrived and got through security, we all had to pick up a little identification card that held a vague story of an individual who lived during the Holocaust, and ultimately on the last page their fate. We then stepped onto an elevator that was designed to look as a gas chamber and we went up to the fourth floor. The fourth floor showed Hitlers rise to power and the burning of books by Jewish authors and about the Nuremberg laws, the floor showed how Hitler got almost the entire German nation to believe that Jews, gypsies. mentally handicapped and other "inferiors"needed to be exterminated in order to create the perfect Aryan race.
As we descended down the museum we saw so many things. I saw an entire room filled from the ground to the ceilings of Jewish culture prior to the Holocaust. I walked through a railroad car smaller than my room if not the size of my room that was filled with 100 people that took them to their deaths. When I walked through the car I stood inside for about 15 seconds before I started to get creeped out. In my overactive imagination I could picture the cart crammed with people begging to be free, begging for water, begging for fresh air, begging to be treated like humans, I imagined myself sitting amongst them and when I looked back I felt something in my heart, a really dull ache of sorrow for the abused. Another exhibit that made me feel something was seeing a sculpture of the gas chamber procedure. First time I looked at it I looked at it backwards and I remember thinking woa! someone put a lot of work into this. Then I realized you start reading on the left and it hit me. I always heard how the soldiers told them all to undress so they could shower, but I never stopped to think if any of them bought that excuse. The expressions on their faces before they went in and actually in the ovens just shocked me. The facial expressions got me the most because some were unsuspecting, the faces of the innocent. Most of the people gassed were women and children who could not work, and I can't even begin to describe how it made me feel but I will forever remember the haunting ghastly clay faces of the gas victims. One more exhibit that influenced me greatly was the section where you could just go in and sit and listen to some of the survivors stories. One story was of a man who would taunt the soldiers behind their backs in a different language, and another was of a man who told jokes to boost people's moral. He said that the most important thing to do was to survive and believe liberation would come because if you had no hope of liberation then you had no reason to live....when you have no will to live it makes dying easier.
Overall what did I take away from this extremely depressing trip?
1. Do not where a belt with a metal belt buckle when going to the Holocaust Museum...because you will be patted down and your bag will be searched.
2. As the last Holocaust survivors get older, we need people to pass on the story, and bear witness. We can never forget... ever what happened. We are the voice of the future and we must teach this lesson to our children and teach our children to continue passing the story down.
3. Personally I made it my mission to join amnesty international, and to make people aware of the effects of genocide; because I think a major problem with our society is that we are self absorbed. We are concerned with ourselves and don't pay attention to the outside world. We turn on the news and say "Wow that's bad, oh the government will fix it," but the truth of the matter is that one person can make a difference. Just being aware is only the beginning, from there we must take action. So I challenge you my blog readers consisting of my mother, my teacher, and a friend of mine, to educate yourself on the genocides taking place all over the world and then I challenge you to do something about it.
