Holocaust Museum

Kara and other PTS students were invited to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. a while back and she signed us up. Earlier this month we got on a bus with other PTS students and took the trip down to D.C.

The Holocaust museum experience was very different than what I was expecting. On the first hand I thought that it would be a lot more macabre than it actually was, but either way I thought that being faced with the horror of it all that I wouldn't be able to make it out without breaking down and crying. This was not the case, indeed I didn't see a tear shed by anyone there. Instead the overwhelming brutality and evil you see in the museum for hours and hours on end just seemed to cause us all to shut down. I for one went into a kind of emotional turtle-shell, being so shocked by an all-day exposure to the Holocaust. The museum takes you through the rise of the Nazi party on the top floor, down into the persecution of Jews and removal to ghettos on the next floor down and finally to the "final solution" on the lower floor. You literally spiral downward as you follow the time line of the Holocaust. The transition from the middle floor to the last floor is a transition of "How could people be so racist and oppressive" to "How could human beings do these unspeakable things to other human beings." It is silent. It is intensely horrifying. Kara and I sat in a room listening to audio recordings of survivors telling about their experiences during the Holocaust. Part way through one of our guides came in to sit and listen as well. He was a Holocaust survivor. I can only describe that moment as being a mix of the most reverent sacredness and the a gut-wrenching disgust.

The second (and I think regrettable) thing I wasn't expecting were the several instances in which I overheard conversations about the current violence in Israel between Israelis and Palestinians, conversation that was itself tinted with racism. In one conversation in particular a woman even shamed "the liberal media" for ever taking pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at kids with rocks. All the while I'm thinking, "those journalists are being a witness to the lopsided violence happening in Israel, how can you honor people who had the courage to be a witnesses and tell the world of the Holocaust but demean the people who would be witnesses against your own tribe." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. As I looked around at this museum full of the testimony of some of the worst racism and suppression ever directed at one people and saw the consequences of that I was saddened to learn that not everyone there had apparently learned the same lesson.

Labels: Life, Non-Violence, Politics