It has been almost a full year since my eye-opening trip to the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial. Since then, a lot has changed in my life and in the world at large. One thing remains true, though. This story needs to be told over and over again for as long as we live. We owe it to ourselves and to our kids, grandkids, and beyond that.
As a commemoration of what transpired that day and what I took away from it, I am posting my original article here. I was well aware of what I was getting myself into. To be blunt, this wasn’t meant to be a fun and exciting trip. This was history calling out to me. Assumptions aside, this was a trip I knew I had to take. It had originally appeared on my university's Journalism Club blog that tanked. Thus, this story didn't get the platform it needed. Now, I can finally do it some justice.
It’s something that most of us can only imagine. We can think about the scariest horror film that we’ve ever seen or the last time we felt really afraid of anything. None of that compares to the true horror, the unbelievably cruel nightmare that 6 million people never woke up from.
A Trip Back In Time
It became blatantly obvious that it wouldn’t be just another trip to the museum. It was meant to be a slingshot into the uncomfortable past of humanity. That Saturday morning, the only thing I was concerned with was getting to the bus on time. The trip was organized by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Rowan, and they said they would be leaving by 6:30 A.M. that morning. My roommate, Kevin, and I finally got onto our bikes at about 6:15 A.M., and we pedaled like it was the end of the free world. The fact that it was raining didn’t help either.
We made it on time and before we knew it, we were bound for Washington, D.C. After two hours and one cup of coffee from a highway stop, we arrived at D.C. where the colors of fall painted the landscape around the Washington Monument. Upon looking at the outside of the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial, Kevin began preparing himself for what he was about to see.
Kevin is of German ancestry, so he understood that this trip to this museum meant facing the bloody history of his people. I felt for him, considering the fact that I have German genes as well. Then again, I’m also Canadian and Lebanese. Whenever I think about that, I just kind of shake it off. My ancestry is a cool part of me, but it doesn’t define me, and I can’t blame myself for the sins of people who simply share a nationality with me. That aside, I did develop a sense of responsibility as we in the group began walking up to the front doors of the museum.
We got there right on time. Before we went inside, a small troop of Navy cadets came marching out from the museum. I watched every single one walk down the steps and respond to me waving at them. I noticed how young they looked. They couldn’t have been any more than 19 or 20 years old. Their faces were already dignified and somehow innocent as well.
After that, my group, at last, made our way into the museum. We got through the metal detector and the security guards and headed for the stairs that would bring us down to the elevators. At this point, one of the professors who was leading us gave each of us an identification card with the name of somebody who was in the Holocaust. His name was Hanandel Drobiarz. He was born in Sosnowiec, Poland in 1919, and he was a trade worker with his uncle.
Level 1: The Rise of Nazi Germany
He was lucky. Yet, I can only imagine the guilt he must have felt for surviving such a devastating monstrosity, such a brutal history that the museum had little trouble conveying through its design. The entirety of the museum was intended to put the fear and trauma of the Holocaust directly into your face. The elevators themselves were designed to resemble the interior of the railroad cars that carried Jews and other victims to the concentration camps. The path upward to the top floor was ironically like a trip back in time. For a while, we weren’t even sure if we were going up.
We were unsure of what to expect, but the grim reality was literally in our faces. The first floor we got to, the elevator doors opened to a gigantic picture on the wall, showing charred, dead bodies, burning in a pit with wooden furnishings as American liberator-troops watched. The rest of the museum certainly isn’t something you would want to bring children to, but people did.
Old and young people alike walked through this first stage of our journey back in time. It was very interesting seeing the faces of all these people. The shock was apparent on many of their faces. We watched as propaganda from Nazi Germany played on screens around us. We looked at the gradual increase of antisemitism in the country, and from there on, the heavy feeling would snowball.
First, we saw how Hitler came into power, and how he barked his agenda to the disenfranchised Germans. All I could think was how familiar his rhetoric was. This man, with a horrible loathing for anybody without pure ethnicity, pointed his finger and his people at all of his enemies, especially the Jews of Germany. It’s simply unbelievable how an entire nation can treat its people like animals. The videos I saw were just swarms of swastika-wearing Nazis, and it was even crazier when we read statistics off a wall mural. Jews made up only 0.88% of Germany’s total population in that time period. The German’s would literally measure every feature of a child’s body to determine if they were a pure-blooded German. Jews were not allowed to own businesses, or even go to school.
Level 2: The Targets
In-between this and the next level was a little break-area where I saw a group of teenage girls all sat on a bench to rest. They couldn’t have been older than 12 or 13, but all of them were on their smartphones. I remember thinking to myself and wondering if they will ever take what they’re seeing to heart. Part of me wants to say, “They’re so young, they shouldn’t have to worry about genocide yet,” but the other half knows that there aren’t a whole lot of Holocaust survivors left. The message that needs to be carried lies in the lap of the youngest generation.
The intensity would only fester more from here on. The next level was dedicated to Nazi Germany’s rampage that lead to World War II. From Hitler’s purges of any person who opposed him politically, to all of the people that he simply didn’t like, it seemed like nobody was safe. The Nazi’s targeted everybody, from the political opponents, to the gypsies, to the homosexuals, to the Catholic priests, to the intelligent Jews, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and to the handicapped. This whole wipe-out of cultures was displayed with sections of the floor devoted to each group systematically killed in the Holocaust. You walk into this part of the museum and you realize that it wasn’t just the Jews. It was literally anyone that wasn’t accepted in Germany. Whether it was through plain-sight executions or killing centers, these were all innocent people with the same blood. I saw the section for the handicapped and I automatically took it personally. I say that because it could’ve been me.
Level 3: The Final Solution and the Aching in my Heart
The third level was literally the hardest to walk through. This floor was the awful nightmare that we all learned about in history class for like a day or so in high school. We hear about how bad it was, but nobody can describe the true terror that is Hitler’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. That is what this floor painted a picture of, and it was terrible.
First, we learned about Anne Frank and felt the heaviness of a young life lost. After that, we saw how the Jews were shoved into cramped ghettos and eventually into railroad cars bound for concentration camp killing centers. They actually had a railroad car on display that people could walk through; and when I got into there, I noticed how small it was, considering that they would put up to 1,000 people into one car. It felt so haunting.
After that, they showed the striped clothing that the inmates wore while they were put through awful slave-labor. A lot of inmates died because of starvation, being overworked, and diseases, but the majority of those at the concentration camp were killed through asphyxiation from the gas chambers. The museum had a gruesomely-detailed clay model of the process that took place in the gas chambers. Then you see how they just stuffed bodies into stoves. It was almost too much to bear.
Level 4: Liberation
At that point, we knew that there was only one level left to get through. Here, we felt a little bit of ease as we saw signs depicting the end of the war. We saw how Germany was being pushed back, and how the Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps. The truth was, though, that this wasn’t just a depiction of the “end of the Holocaust". This was a blatant display of the pure devastation that was left in the wake of the Holocaust. Bulldozers were pushing uncountable amounts of dead bodies along the German grounds to be buried. The Allied Forces were seeing first-hand what many people can only consider the work of the devil. For a time, the world knew what evil was. The world had its very own super-villain, but this was no comic book story. This was real, this was bloody, and this was a monstrosity that must never happen again.
That’s how I left the museum. I know that we are living in an era where the cruelties of man in the past are overlooked. It’s unfortunate how our culture is desensitized to the evil that happens right around us. We try to say that we will never let genocide happen again. Yet, we have Cambodia, Darfur, and now the Christians killed in the Middle East by ISIS.
It’s easy to feel like we don’t have an effect in the world, but we have more ability to protest genocide now than ever. It’s like how I felt when I saw those young children on their field trip. Most of them were on their smartphones, but what do they say to each other now? Do they still discuss the horrifying photos that they saw? What will happen from here on?
There are 6 million voices that need to be heard. They are calling for change. They are calling for peace. They call for us to remind them that they did not die in vain. If anything, they call for a sign that we will make things better. There’s no escaping it, and we’re all in the limelight that begs us to challenge the world. Challenge it to look at itself and its hypocrisy. Challenge it to continue pursuing justice for those who never left the camps, including the 100,000 survivors.