Holocaust Museum - Thoughts

Though I walked through Washington, DC's Holocaust Museum clutching my notebook and pens, I did not take any notes. I did take some pictures to help jog my memory.

I consider myself fairly well versed in the atrocities of the Holocaust. I'll never understand how it could happen, but I know the basics. I know it happened, and also cannot understand how there are Holocaust deniers out there. 

I left learning (or being reminded) that after the Americans freed Auschwitz, half of the prisoners still died within a week, and more kept dying. 

I learned the military leaders debated the pros and cons of bombing Auschwitz. Would that have made a difference?

I was reminded that non-Jews were also rounded up. Homosexuals. Jehovah Witnesses. Mennonites. Political prisoners. Others I did not note. People who tried to hide anyone in the above categories.

A couple of weeks ago at McCarter Theater in Princeton I saw the powerful play "Here there are Blueberries." If it ever hear about it in your area, go. I'm surprised I did not write a blogpost about it at the time. The play is based on the Holocaust Museum's decision whether or not to accept a donation of a photo album of snapshots taken at Auschwitz at the height of the Holocaust, and their subsequent research. Their hesitation was that their mission is to honor the victims and this photo album showed the perpetrators celebrating and having fun while people were being murdered and worked to death. 

The play unfolds talking about ordinary Germans and their roles in the Holocaust. In the end, none of them were punished or took responsibility. They were just doing their jobs. The doctor who decided as they came off the cattle cars who should live and who should die. The person who pulled the lever said "someone else had already decided their fate." Each person was a cog. One person's grandfather told him "that was the best time of my life." Those words will forever haunt me.

As I'm watching the play, I wondered for the first time what my extended family was doing in Germany. My grandfather was born in 1916 in New York City. His parents were also born in New York in the late 19th century. What about their parents? My great-great grandparents. Presumably they left behind siblings, cousins, friends, etc. What did they do during World War II? What would I have done? We all want to be the hero, but most of us are not heroes, only people trying to survive.

Walking around the museum, I did not see a reference to the photo album.

The exhibits start on the fourth floor as we exited from an industrial elevator designed to transport you to the past. The fourth floor is called The Nazi Assault, 1933-1939. The Nazis got their ideas for eugenics from the belief in the United States that some were deemed "racial inferior" or "enemies of the state." People were desperate to leave before things got worse.

Down a flight of stairs to the middle floor: The Final Solution, 1940-1945. As the programs against the Jews grew from persecution to separation to extermination. Much focus was on the ghettos to the gas chambers. On this floor was a chamber filled with family photos taken by four prominent portrait photographers from the 1890s to the 1930s. With the use of a handheld computer, you could learn more about a select number of the pictures. You could see they went down the the floor below us.

Names of places that no longer exist

Hall of family portraits

Down another flight of stairs to the second floor: The Last Chapter. The present. How we respond matters. How to render justice. The efforts of the Holocaust survivors. The photos from the floor above are visible here with more stories.

A boxcar that would have transported
100 prisoners. We walked through it.

Rather than being allowed to cross
the street, Jews had to walk on bridges built
above the street.

Photographer of many of the prisoner
photos. He risked his life to save them.

As we left we had the opportunity to take the identification card of a real person. Mine was of Ludmilla Schatz, born November 10, 1896 in Ukraine. Despite living in France at the time, she perished in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 45. 

Don had someone else's card.

On the first floor was a moving story told through Daniel, a Jewish child growing up in Nazi Germany as his world changed.

The number of years to get a visa
to move to the United States

In the basement was a temporary exhibit on how ordinary Americans were reacting. Polls about should we admit more Jews? Should was participate in the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Were the rumors of concentration camps true?

We were running late to catch the bus back, so we did not spend as much time here as we could have. I was reminded that in that day most people got their news from ten-minute newsreels shown before movies. While limiting news to only a few minutes a week (and only if you go to the movies) plus sporadic radio updates is one extreme, so is today's non-stop barrage of news. We need a happy medium to have time to absorb all that is happening in the world. The constant repeating and twisting of events is too much.