Holocaust Museum

So I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum today. So be warned if you are sensitive, this entry will deal with some pretty horrific stuff, I had no idea what i was getting into emotionally.

It's free which is really important so everyone and anyone can go, but it's really horrific so children under ten aren't allowed, which I completely agree with after going. We paid for audio guides though because I didn't want to miss anything. I'm glad I did because I honestly don't know if I could stomach it again.

It started out like any other museum, chronicling Hitler's rise to power, how Germany came to be under his totalitarian rule- it wasn't fun stuff but it was by the book, straightforward history. Even though I knew what it led to I could handle this. All to soon though, the hate propganda came into it. He really believed Jews were the scum of the Earth, that they would be the downfall of man kind, of the economy, of everything. It sounded insane to me, but I watched as the German people ate it up, spewed it out and the country's policies became based on hate and racism, as race laws were passed and suddenly equality no longer existed- Jews were less than human.

Still this was early on, just in Germany and I had no idea just how much worse it would get, of course I know the basics but nothing could prepare me to see it, as the Jewish people were corralled ito ghettos, their possessions stolen, shops looted, religious articals taken and sold off like cheap junk. There was a law passed than any non jew could go ito a Jewish home or shop and help himself to anything he wanted. Imagne someone said you had no right to your most valued possessions. German soldiers wouldn't just take valuable things, but things special for sentimental reasons, a baby's cradle, for example. Imagine having your children deprived of everything in front of your eyes because a law said you didn't have the right to owning anything.

The ghettos were crowded and unsantitary and people had very little. What's worse is how people tried to flee to other countries only to have the Germans come and occupy those, so that even when they thought they had escaped, Germany followed, conquering, occupying and persuing the Jews. They were determined to eradicate them, erase all traces of them, to make them extinct. You never think of human beings going extinct but Hitler was determined that there would be nothing left of the Jewish people.

What really threw me though, even more than that was when things started getting gruesome. Suddenly they were being deported, rounded up and killed. If they couldnt be used for forced labor they were killed. In one ghetto we had to watch as the president was forced to tell the people that every child under ten couldn't work, and since they couldnt be used for work they would have to be handed over to be killed. He had to tell the parents to hand over their youngest children to be slaughtered. And the people cried no, no, I will dont give you to them, I will not give you up to their children, weeping, and he said if they dont then the Germans will just kill everyone else.

Can you imagine having to hand over your children to die because they are useless in the eyes of the Germans? One old man who survived told of how his mother bribed a guard to look away just for a moment so she could lift the barbed wire and left her son out telling him to run and never look back. She would never know if he survived, and he would never see her again. He was only 8 but it was his only chance to escape alive.

They had diaries of young teens who watched their world crumble, who were contemplating death and hatred at 14 ad wondering how long it was going to be until they were deported. They had letters from parents terrified for their children. What's worse was when they found notes thrown from the cattle cars when the jews where crammed aboard to be shipped off to die. The Germans lied to them, telling them they were being moved, and to just do what the Germans said- when really they were going to the death camps. There is a note from a child to her mother promising her they will meet again, telling her that she is being moved but she is sure it will not be long until they are able to find each other again. She had no idea she was on her way to die. There were letters asking the finder to please tell their family where they are going, what happened to them, none of them knowing the letters will not be found until after they are dead.

Soon, though, they knew. They knew that they were being exterminated when someone escaped, someone told what was going on, the gas chambers, the deaths of millions, that Hitler was trying to eradicate them. And then it's just room after room of stories of the dead. Not just numbers. Their last letters, diaries found, begging someone to remember them, that they lived, that they were human, telling what was done to them, the horrors, the starvation and sickness and cruelty, all in their own handwriting, I saw it, the papers they hid for someone to find, knowing they were going to die.

There were testimonials too from survivors telling of what they had seen, babies and childrens head smashed against walls in front of their eyes, how at 13 one man recalled that after arriving he was forced to pick the gold fillings from the dead corpses teeth- of his fellow jews. Of how they believed the Germans at first, when they said if they were good, they would let them go and when they realized they would all die. Horror filled stories of death after death. And the samll valuables they left behind are the only way they were remembered. Artwork or poems or diaries found buried, hidden, desperate attempts to leave something behind before they were forgotten, erased, killed. Can you imagine getting glimpses into the last moments, the last few days of countless people's lives? People knowing they were going to die?

It was just room after room of desolation as the numbers rose and the Germans spread, I almost couldn't handle anymore. Tears were constantly threatening to spill onto my cheeks as I read about parents forced to watch their children die, read about children losing their parents, being seperated form them, one death after another of real live people. It was so real, their photographs, their shoes, their words all saved, found long after they had been murdered by the thousands. I felt overwhelmed and like I couldnt keep seeing this, reading it, hearing the survivors choke out the horror they had lived through. But I forced myself to. How did they live this horror story when I couldnt even handle it in a museum?

The worst though, was hearing about their attempts to flee and how many countries refused them entrance. There was a ship full of refugees fleeing Germany who had obtained Cuban visas and were on their way to freedom. When they finally arrived the cubans wouldnt honor the visas they issued. They had changed thier mind and even after days of talking back and forth they wouldnt let anyone off the ship and forced the ship out of their harbor. The captain went to Florida in a desperate attempt to get the refugees somewhere safe and the U.S wouldnt let them in either. They circled around outside of Florida for days in depseration until the captain was forced to head back because of food shortages and the refuggees were sent to their death. Some jumped form the ship instead of go back to germany where they would be killed. Eventually they were let off in some other country, but many never did make it to safety, captured and brought to camps after being so close to freedom just to die. Britain, which was in charge of Israel at the time, wouldnt let refugees in either, refusing them the safety of their own homeland. They too forced shipfuls of refuegees to return to their deaths. Even the countries not killing off Jews didn't want them. It seemed no one was innocent, they all let the Jews die until finally WWII broke out.

Diaries of their despair at being shunned by the world to be killed by the thousand were almost too much. There were chronicles of local villagers beating Jews to death, not just Germans by Ukrainans, Austrians, just every day people, not soldiers slaughtering Jews. As if the whole world wanted them gone. How must it have felt? To see your people slowly disappearing by the hundreds of thousands as the world looked on.

Then there were the death marches. As WWII finally broke out and the Allies looked to be getting the upper hand, the Germans didnt want any Jews rescued so they forced them to march through the freezing winter with almost no food, in rags and wooden clogs. If they were weak the Germans shot them. Out of 2,500 in one case I think only 180 or something horrifying like that survived. When passing through villages the soldiers wouldnt allow any food to be given to them or any help as they were forced onwards.

At the end there were pictures of people on the death march who were saved and brought to hospitals. Many died there. the pictures were horrific, emaciated, skeletal looking people. Women who were 25 looked like they were frail 70 year old women. All in such pain. So many died even after the war had been won.

It was a horrifying experience. I was just so so deeply emotioanlly disturbed. Wrecked. At the end there was a video of all these naked dead bodies being tossed into a ditch. Even a tractor was pushig dozens of bodies, just moving heaps of dead people into this massive grave like limp life sized broken dolls. I couldnt take it. I was going to throw up or start weeping, or both. I ran from the room. How did the world let this happen? How did so many countries support it? How did so many others turn their back? How did this hate not get stopped before millions were slaughtered, with nowhere no run or hide, no one to help them, thinking it was the end for their entire people? They probably died thinking the Germans would win, there would be no more Jews.

I was riding the bus home and as always I passed the playground with dozens of adorable little jewish boys and girls playing, the boys with kippahs and curls and the girls all dressed in long shirts and shirts, signifying them as orthodox. Beautiful little chidren, obviously jewish, playing as mothers looked on holding infants and chatting with other mothers. I wish those mothers who had to watch their children die could be alive like this today, I wish they could know that their people lived on. that they survived. That Hitler lost. I almost cried on the bus thinking thank God, thank God the Jewish people made it through. And thinking about mothers just like these ones, just like mothers I know, just like these people who were so brutally murdered. It could have been the end of us all. But it wasn't, just barely.

The end of the museum covered the end of the war. It should have been a happy ending. But there was none. There was no happy ending. Tons of Jewish children who had been smuggled out with non jews were now orphans and in Poland it was even more Antisemitic than before the war as many couldnt handle the fact that there were still Jews alive. Survivors had lost entire families, homes. They had nothing left. They were free but they were alone, their comunities destroyed. I left the museum crushed. You end and come out onto this balcony with an epically beautiful view of a Valley below. All I couldnt think was God, I'm so lucky to be standing here, so lucky I wasn't born 70 years ago. So lucky I live in America. I just stood there, devestated over all the people who were taken away from beautiful views like this never to see them again, killed in dirty, smelly concentration camps, alone and scared. All because they existed. The view didn't comfort me, it seemed unfair. So horribly unfair. Everything was wrong. How could it all have happened? It had taken me three hours of death and devestation to make it to this balcony and all I wanted to do was leave, like I shouldnt be able to stand there breathing in fresh air after all those people died wanting nothing but to be remembered.

The last room was the hall of remembrance. It was round with shelves that went below and above the floor level, so it was thousands and thousands of huge binders, row after row after row of them. All with the names and stories of those jews in the holocaust who hadn't had a proper burial. Now their stories were kept as a symbolic burial where they would always be remembered because the Germans wanted them forgotten, erased. So now their stories are told, hudreds of thousands line the walls, the dome above has 600 pictures of beautiful smiling people, from before they were taken, from the lives they lived that were destroyed. And then there are more shelves, empty shelves for the people who we still havent found. the numbers dont match up yet, but the museum is on a mission so that every Jew killed will have their name at the very least recorded, so they can be remembered.

Then on my way home Miriam was telling me of her friend. Now there are busses and vans with stripes, ad arabic writing on them. The Arabs had to have their own busses, couldnt bear to take the city bus with the Jews. We were told not to take these busses. So I didn't. But miriams friend had no idea. She tried to get on one. They stopped her ad asked, "Are you a Jew?" No, she answered, because she was't. She was just a canadian tourist. "you look like a jew" they insisted, to which she said again that she wasn't Jewish. They told her they didn't believe her and wouldnt let her get on the bus. No Jews allowed. It made my blood run cold. Even today there is still such hate towards Jews, it terrifies me.

It's bee a draining day...