Holocaust Museum

I've lived in many cities near which is a Holocaust museum, but I've never visited one.  My friend Sherrie had once told me of her school project-mandated visit to the L.A. one.   There was some sort of dark tunnel through which patrons walk and hear words such as "slavery," "torture," etc.  This is what I thought I would see in addition to gory images and informative placards.

D.C.'s Holocaust Museum was not as gory.  It was somber and informative.  I had wondered if I should have brought the kids.  As I passed through the exhibits, I saw little kids about Simone's age asking their parents and grandparents about what they saw and realized that the images were not too horrific for young minds but definitely evoked the gravity of the atrocity.   I'm still glad I didn't bring the kids because they would have been so bored before we finished the first floor of exhibits.  I wouldn't have been able to read as much as I did if they were around begging me to move forward.

What I didn't expect to happen was for me to become so depressed.  Sure the subject is depressing, but that usually fascinates me.  I think I was overloaded with the barbarity of the Germans that it just weighed so heavily on my brain.  After a floor and a half of exhibits, my brain didn't want to process any more blatant disrespect for human life.  Or maybe it was just that at this time the exhibits turned their focus to the concentration camps and I just didn't want to think about it the gas chambers and incinerators and mass graves.

A feeling I didn't expect to encounter was rage.  How did an entire nation decide it was a good idea to follow a lunatic?  Of course, there were probably a few Germans who thought Hitler was cuckoo and probably left the country instead of being forced to participate in inflicting genocide.  But a lot of people were on board with boycotting Jewish stores, burning their synagogues, and then shoving them into ghettos.  What united cruelty!

There was an exhibit that was geared toward children's learning about the Holocaust.  The narrator is a young Jewish German boy whose once-content life was gradually stripped of liberties.  By showing the change in living quarters, kids can feel how dismal life became for Jews as the Nazis continually shuffled the them towards extinction.  I have already told Simone and Max a little about Nazis and anti-semitism, but I haven't shown them images.   This exhibit will be just right of a visual exposure to the subject.