Leanne dropped us off at the King Street Metro station and we headed into the Smithsonian Station, en route to the Holocaust Museum. At the corner of 14th Street and Independence Ave, we noticed three outside broadcast vans grouped near the Washington Monument, watching a lone thrill seeker (actually he was probably a building engineer) roped onto the topmost part of the Monument (550 feet in the air) and we presumed he was checking the cracks in the obelisk, which have yet to be structurally assessed, after the 23 Aug earthquake. Despite that diversion, we arrived a little while before the Museum opened, but killed time by sitting on a concrete fence, watching other people.
At 10.00am we presented at the Holocaust Museum and after collecting our ID cards (these are created by the Museum in the name and with the detail of, one of the Holocaust victims or survivors), we headed up to the fourth floor to start the tour.
My ID card was in the name of a Polish Jew, Chaim Werzbe who was deported to the Treblinka concentration camp and who died there at the age of 31. Marg was accompanied by Barbara Marton from a small Transylvanian town named Beliu. Barbara was deported to Auschwitz in 1940 but survived to make her way to Israel after the war and later in 1968, to the USA.
No photos were allowed inside the Museum, so I can't include any here.
It was very chilly inside the Museum, obviously the temperature control was set for frigid, but I've no idea why. Anyway we progressed through the various displays all concentrating on the appalling plight of the European Jew and the inhuman bestiality of the German.
There is a collection of photos of Jewish folk who were exterminated during the Holocaust which stretches in a four walled segment, between the first and fourth floors. It is a grim reminder of the millions who were killed in increasingly efficient ways by the Germans, right through to the Zylon B (or prussic acid) gases in the concentration camps.
The one display which struck me the most, was a video showing a British soldier driving a bull dozer, pushing scores of bodies into a huge pit. They were obliged by the threat of disease, to immediately inter the bodies they found at the newly liberated camps. This one was at Bergen Belsen and the soldier was driving the bulldozer with a hanky over his nose, no doubt the stench was overpowering and it would have been a memory which stuck with this soldier for the rest of his days.
The other video which I thought compelling was one taken after the liberation of a concentration camp where the German population and the Nazi guards were obliged to convey the dead bodies from their place of death, into huge newly dug mass graves. Some of the guards were simply dragging the corpses by their legs or arms and I don't know why the supervising Allied soldiers allowed them to treat these bodies so disrespectfully. I think I would have stuck a rifle up the German's backside and counselled him to carry the body rather than drag it. Again, anyone who was unfortunate enough to have come across these scenes, must have carried a memory of this man made tragedy, all their lives.
It is one of the more evocative of the Washington museums and one with a clear educational message to visitors. How could large numbers of Germans, kill that many men, women and children without remorse ?
It is a tough Museum to visit, but everyone needs to go there at least once - if only to give the finger to people like David Irvine (Brit "historian" and a Holocaust denier)
Lunch was taken at McDonalds inside the Air and Space Museum and then we returned to Old Town to rendezvous with Leanne at 5.00pm for the drive home.
