I saw the Holocaust Museum today.
Like everyone else, I started the tour of the building on the 4th floor. When the elevators open, I was assaulted with the black and white image of charred bodies lying in a row. It took up the whole wall. Suddenly I was walking through the atrocious past that has added to the quickly blackening fabric of humanity's history.
The floors were filled with stories of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party. The tearing apart of families. The inhumanity of the camps. There was a scale model of the gas chambers, where first people were put into a room to strip. There were posters on the wall that said absurd things like "Cleanliness leads to freedom" that led the room's occupants to think they were going to a hygienic cleansing shower of sorts. But then they would be locked in chambers where they unsuspectingly would be gas. The chambers even had shower heads so that they wouldn't realize what was about to happen.
There was a wall of child drawings. 23 in all. Each had a caption underneath with a name, date of birth, and "deported to Auschwitz." Only 4 had "survived" next to the caption.
There was a section of hundreds of shoes, all belonging to some victim of the Holocaust. It was at that point that I finally felt like I would break and cry.
You read about it, and you continue to hear learn about through various media. Even at this place of remembrance, I know I still don't get it fully. What gets to me is that this kind of hate still exists in the world. And people say they don't need a Savior.
