some perspective...

We were hit pretty hard this week. On our field trip day we went to Yad Vashem in West Jerusalem. Then yesterday we had a Holocaust survivor who had been to 9 different camps come and speak to us. I’ve only met one Holocaust survivor before him and he was 92 years old. It’s weird to think my kids won’t have the same opportunity.



Yad Vashem is Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial. I was really looking forward to visiting, because that history is interesting to me and I thought it would be even more interesting to see it in Israel. I was a little apprehensive about it too, because learning about the Holocaust can be overwhelming.We had breakfast, and then we left on buses at 8:00 AM. When we got there, the gates of the complex (which is very big and houses several different buildings) were ugly and black and kind of twisted around. I don't really know how to explain it, but it was obvious the emotion they were trying to convey. It's up on a hill which overlooks several valleys all around, and it's a really beautiful location.
Our Jewish narrative teacher met us there, and took us around for an hour or so to see a few things outside. One of the things he showed us is this big plaza made out of limestone (everything Jewish in Jerusalem is limestone) with these two big metal sculptures in front. One of them was a relief sculpture of people being prodded to a concentration camp. The other was more of a statue of a bunch of people, with one leader in particular, who were supposed to be resisting the Nazis. Our teacher told us a few things about those two scenarios that I hadn't known before.
So some of the Jews resisted and wouldn't do what the Nazis were telling them, and they were killed on the spot. But many of them did what they were told, because they knew that there would be a chance of survival. After the Holocaust, survivors were looked down upon. It was so weird for me to hear that. The Jews thought of those who resisted as heroes who stood up for what was right. Those who went along to the camps were seen as being weak, and especially those who survived. The attitude toward them was, "So, whose food did you steal so that you could be here now, while they died? Who did you take advantage of to get you where you are?" They were seen as cowards who weren't loyal to their people. Isn't that terrible? So that's the reason why so many survivors kept quiet for so long after the war. Lots of those who had a number tattooed on their arms would wear long-sleeved shirts even on hot days so that people wouldn't see the tattoo and start to ask questions. Just in recent years have we begun to hear more about all this from them. I thought that was crazy. (PS, did you know that the only camp where they did those tattoos was Auschwitz? So if you ever see someone who has one, you can be 100% sure they were there and not somewhere else.)



There's a museum that we went through next and it was shaped like a long triangle. It starts on one side of the hill, with the top of the hill at the same height as the top of the triangle. It comes out from the hill about 30 feet on both sides, and then it goes through the hill in the middle. Does that make sense? So when you're inside the museum, you're inside the hill.
It was a really incredible museum. Which I almost feel bad saying concerning the topic but there was the main triangle-shaped corridor, coming to a point high above your head, that you could see all the way down (made of cold concrete) and then off to both sides of the corridor were all the different rooms. The corridor was blocked off so you couldn't just walk all the way down from one end to the other, even if you wanted to. You had to follow the path from one room to the other, crossing the corridor each time, and getting closer and closer to the end. Everything there was symbolic of something, or had a specific purpose, and the purpose of this was to force all visitors to see the whole story of the Holocaust, from beginning to end.
It started showing a conglomeration of a whole bunch of different videos of life in Jewish Europe before the war, projected on one end of the huge triangle. Then we walked from room to room and saw from the beginning of the Nazis rising to power, learning about how their organization and Hitler were really a beacon of hope to the Germans after WWI, and seeing the progression of how threatened they felt by the Jews, and then started the dehumanizing propaganda, and then persecution, which got bigger and bigger until the concentration camp stories and pictures that we've all seen before. I really understood the big picture better than I ever have.




A couple of things stood out to me.
First of all, one of the most terrible things was how the Nazis' philosophy was to deceive each of their victims, up until the very end. Up to the very moment that they undressed for the "showers," they were told to remember the hook's number that they hung their clothes on so that they'd remember where to go get them after they got cleaned up. The soldiers picked Jews out to work, and they were required to lie to the others about where they were going so they'd all go without a fight, and then when they were all dead, these Jews had to go back in, get the bodies, and get rid of them.
They had to pay for tickets to take the trains to the camps, and there were signs up at the camps that indicated the trains ran both ways. They had fake train stations at the camps with fake arrival and departure schedules. All of this made it much easier on the Nazis because almost no crowd control was needed. The more you know about those stories, the more you realize how much control Satan had over these people. It's almost unbelievable.
I really appreciated how the museum took such great care to keep reminding us that, while 6 million Jews were killed during this time, each one of those people had a life, a personality, a family, a job, and so on. It wasn't just a big group of 6 million, it was an individual at a time.


(obviously, this isn't me....i took this picture so....)

After that main museum, our guide took us to the children's memorial, which was even more powerful, if that's possible. It had its own building. In front of it, there were these square stone pillars, about the width of a person, and they were arranged in a group of about 15, with the tall ones in the back, shorter in the middle, and the shortest ones in front. It was supposed to look like a group of children, arranged in a singing group or having a picture taken or something. All of them were very roughly cut off at the top. It was meant to symbolize that their lives had been cut off and they were never able to get any farther than that.

You walked in, and it was almost pitch black, with only a few black and white pictures of some children, who were killed, on the wall in front of you. Then you enter the main room, and it's even darker, but with hundreds of tiny candles scattered around. You can't even tell where they're sitting, but you can see them everywhere you look, against the black. Then there are mirrors all around, so the candles are reflected, and it looks like millions of little bright specks to represent the 1.5 million children that died. There's a voice that reads names, ages, and hometowns of some of the children. I don't think there was a dry eye.



I’ll write about other things later. I don’t think I should mix in other topics with this post. (it’s too long anyways.)