By: Morgan
This day was the most emotional of all the days on the Freedom Tour so far. Today, we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. When we got to the front door, we had to wait in line. All of our hearts were heavy because we knew what we were going to see, and we were all sad. I asked Dash what he was feeling at that time. His reply was, ”I was wondering what it was going to be like. I was nervous.” We all were nervous as we entered the museum. We walked down some stairs and took an identity card. The identity cards are cards that are four pages long. One the first page there was a picture of a real person who experienced the Holocaust, and information like when and where they were born. You open that page on the fourth floor (we start on the top and work our way down), then the next page on the third, and so on. You don’t know if they survived until the end. After getting our cards we all sat down and listened to what we were going to experience and the rules. There were three elevators that could each hold twenty-five people. We got on the elevators in the order that they came and once we were inside the TV started to play. The video that was playing was about the Nazis and Germany. We reached the top and stepped out. The first thing that you saw was a large picture of a pile of dead bodies inside a concentration camp. It was very sad to see how many people had been killed so cruelly, and the fact that they were just thrown into a pile together was sickening to think about. After going around the wall you came upon a room. This had one of the outfits that the prisoners wore hanging up, as well as a little theater and pictures and information on the rise of the Nazis. I went in to watch the video along with many others. The video was called The Nazi Rise to Power, and the title says what it was about. I learned many things about the Nazis that I hadn’t known before, including that Hitler took his right arm raise from the Italian leader. After the presentation was over I continued on through the fourth floor. I came across this section about how the Nazis burned any book that they deemed “un-German.” There was a quote on the wall that said:
“Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned.”
- Heinrich Heine
German Jewish Poet
This quote sadly became true, as the Nazis burned many people inside the concentration camps. I think that, when Heine wrote this, he didn’t know that it would become sickeningly true. The fourth floor continued on, talking about how the Nazis rose to power and took over Germany. The next thing you saw was how the Nazis used propaganda and fear to manipulate the German population. They had posters with drawings of artist-depicted “Jewish” people, which were drawn unrealistically to scare the Germans. This was a very cruel thing to do as they were not all actually monsters as the drawings showed but kind, loving people. The next part was about technology that the Nazis used. One thing that stood out to me was that they needed a machine, called the Hollerith, to keep track of how many prisoners they had. Just the fact that they needed technology to keep track of them shows how many that they took. When I walked around the corner I saw a bed, but a inhuman-looking bed. I read the sign next to it and learned that it was one of the beds that they used to killed handicapped people in. Hitler had created an operation called Operation T4, which was a secret killing of handicapped people. This is something that I didn’t know had happened, and I was shocked to learn about it. This was the end of the fourth floor.
To get to the third floor you walked through a sloped glass hallway. On one side of the hallway was the names of all the Jewish towns and cities that had been nearly or completely wiped out by Hitler. There were so many towns. I stood there for a second, then I moved on. The first thing on the third floor was about the ghettos that the Jewish people were forced to live in. They were small, cramped places that had little to no sanitation, which led to sickness and death. At the end of the war they found out that there had been 400 ghettos all around the country. This took me by surprise. I had thought that there would have been far less, but I was wrong. The next section appalled me. I learned that there were specially trained “killing squads” that traveled with the Nazis as they invaded other countries. They killed thousands of Jewish people right then and there, then threw them on the ground and left. This was very disturbing, so I moved quickly on. The next thing that I saw was one of the train cars that they used to transport the Jewish people to the concentration camps. I know that they put up to eighty people into the cars, so I was taken aback when I saw just how small the cars were. They were very small. I can’t imagine the uncomfortableness and pain the inhabitants must have been in. I walked through the car and continued on. The next thing that stood out to me was the shelves filled with peoples belongings. There were hairbrushes, pillows, and prosthetic legs there. These were very sad to look at, but I was horrified at the next room. This room, on both sides, were filled with shoes. There were children’s shoes, high heels, slippers, avery kind of show you could imagine was there. To think that these shoes had all been wore by a living human being that had been put through terrible and tragic events was heartbreaking to think about. The next room had a picture of all the hair that the Nazis had collected, whether to use it to stuff mattresses or to line shoes. The next room had a video that you could watch that was about the medical experiments they did to prisoners. The video showed pictures of a person being put under air pressure that was getting thicker and thicker, and it showed the pain that he was being put through. It also told us about the cold water experiments and the surgeries that they did to the people, while they were still alive. This was very disturbing to watch, and I am disgusted that a human being could do that to another person. That was the last thing that stood out to me on the third floor.
To get to the second floor you had to walk through another sloped glass hallway, but this time the inscriptions were names of victims, whether they lived or not. The first thing that I saw on the second floor was a video of how they disposed of the bodies. They showed a girl being dragged across the ground then tossed into a pit. The most disturbing way, however, was when they had a big pile of bodies that they pushed with a bulldozer into the “grave.” “There’s really nothing more horrifying than seeing thousands of bodies being dumped without any care or remorse into a big dirt pit,” Mikayla said. This floor had a hallway dedicated to the children of the Holocaust. One of the sides was filled with drawings that some of the children made in the ghettos before they were sent off. It was very sad to think that many of these children probably didn’t survive. The next thing that touched my heart was the video that they were playing. It showed different survivors telling there stories. One was about death marches. She said how they had to line up four abreast and march with no rests through freezing weather for months on end. They shown a small light on the group, and if you stepped out of the light or lagged behind they shot you. She said how, to get some rest, the other three girls would hold you while you slept for five minutes, then switch off, all while marching. They did this for five months straight. The fact that they managed to survive through all of this touches your heart and makes you rethink everything you have ever complained about. After watching this for about fifteen minutes, I continued on to the first floor.
The first thing you could do on the first floor was write in a book your feelings and thoughts. It was very touching to read everything that people had to say, and there even was a Holocaust survivor that had written in it. On this floor there was a Hall of Remembrance, which you could go in and light a candle for all those who died, and for the ones who lived. The final thing that you could do was walk through this set up of Daniel’s life. Daniel was a made-up boy, but was based off of real children during the Holocaust. You could walk through his house, then the ghetto and concentration camps he lived in. Along the way you could read some of his diary entries explaining what was happening at that time. At the end you could write him a letter and “mail” it to him. The Holocaust Memorial Museum was a very horrific yet touching memorial that played on my heartstrings and made me question what humanity is. It is very hard to express just what I was feeling, so I wrote a poem about the Holocaust.
Never Forge
Shoes piled high
Hair in a mound
Millions who will nevermore utter a sound
Cut short from life
In horrible ways
With solemn eyes they gaze
At their tormentors and saviors
Family and friends
Who tried to stay with them all through their ends
Never forget those who perished
Never forget the ones who were saved
And never forget all that they gave
No comments:
Post a Comment