One of the first things I did on my trip to Israel was to visit the Yad Vashem holocaust museum. In fact, I went almost as soon as we landed, despite having been travelling for over 30 hours with little sleep!
The memorial park consists of several buildings and is spread over 45 acres of park land. We quickly visited a few of the monuments, because we wanted to get in on an English tour of the museum which would be starting in a hour.
One was a children’s memorial which was more a work of art than anything else. You entered a darkened building with glass walled corriders inside looking in towards the center which had tiny pinpoints of light, perhaps mulitplied with the use of mirrors in the darkness. A disembodied voice quietly read out names and ages of children who died in the holocaust along with the name of their hometown. They say over 1.5 million children died.
The Holocaust History Museum was a relatively new partially underground building. It in itself was a work of art. The beginning of the exhibitions was in the darkened underground part and the guide said that symbolized the horror of the holocaust. But the end of the tour was in a lighter section of the building that opened out onto an overlook on the hillside looking across a valley giving a panoramic view of Jerusalem. That symbolized the light and hope that came out of the darkness as Jews were finally allowed to live in their own land.
The museum was arranged in more or less chronological order so we got the feel of the increasing darkness as early signs of what was to come in the form of the signs
of the times and ominous warnings to Jews in Europe. Most of course couldn’t believe it and continued to live as they always had. The guide emphasized how Jews were lulled into going to the camps meekly. They couldn’t believe their homeland would do this to them. Then there were exhibits of the roundups, the ghettos, the camps. The museum had many artifacts such as clothing, diaries, books, and personal belongings of Jews who had been rounded up and sent to camps. There were photographs of people and documentary footage of some of the horrors taken by the Nazis themselves such as bodies being bulldozed.. They used footage of starving Jewish children to show Germans how subhuman Jews were to let their kids starve.There were also videotaped interviews with survivors of the concentration camps as well as written comments from diaries and journals. And how Germans and others turned there faces away and didn’t want to believe it. Not only Germans, but also Americans, the British, Australians.
Near the end of the building was a large exhibit called the Hall of Names. It is a large domed chamber with bookshelves from floor to ceiling half filled with ledgers. The ledgers were filled with testimony pages – each one with the name, address, and
any known facts about someone who died in the holocaust. They said they had accumulated 2.5 million names so far submitted by friends and relatives and were appealing for more before the memories were lost. The dome was covered with photographs of men, women and children who had died.
Although I was beyond fatigued, I found the exhibitions as a whole profoundly disturbing. Not just because of what had happened but the realization that it could so easily happen again, and probably will, not just to Jews but to others too. In fact, on a smaller scale in many places it is already beginning - the dehumanizing and marginalizing of certain groups of people, aided by the press and government and religious and civic leaders. While the masses turn their faces away, not wanting to see. God help us!
Pictures: 1. mine 2.and 4. from http://www1.yadvashem.org/ 3. from http://robsreg.blogspot.com/
