Remembering What I Saw There

M and I took a friend to see the Holocaust Museum in DC this past weekend. It was the first time for all of us.

Outside of the building, besides a line to get through security, was a large banner telling all visitors to "Remember What You See Here". I had already figured it would be a heavy experience, and this did nothing to contradict that notion.

They were letting people in in shifts, so we had to wait about half-an-hour before we could go in. We spent that time getting lunch, and we ended up running late, so we entered the exhibit behind the big 1:30 group. The huge mass of people we found ourselves having to maneuver through made us (or me, anyway) wonder why they just didn't let people trickle in a little at a time as they arrived. I'm guessing it would be worse if everybody came in at their own convenience.

The exhibit started on the fourth floor (technically, it began with an elevator ride to the fourth floor) and continued down back to the first floor. It began with some pictures and testimony from the Allied liberation of the camps (General Eisenhower made it a point to visit a camp, so that he could say with first-hand knowledge that they really existed), and then it went back to the beginning - the rise of the Nazis in Germany. One of the mini-movie rooms went back even further, showing a min-doc of anti-semitism throughout the ages. Did you know that Jews were blamed for the Black Plague? Sad, but true.

So they pretty much covered the groundwork - the Nazis taking power, imposing the Nuremburg Laws, Kristallnacht, and all that - and then moved on to the pre-war expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia and the war-causing expansion into Poland. Then it got to the actual Holocaust.

There was a lot more to it than just the concentration camps. One of the things I took from the experience was just how long the extermination was going on before the Nazis finally sat down and organized it all. One tends to think "concentration camp" when they think "Holocaust". It was much more than that. Not pleasant at all.

But it was the concentration camp portion of the exhibit that had the most striking artifacts. They had an actual box car from one of the trains that went to and from the camps. They even had it on the actual rails it was sitting on when the Allies found it. The exhibit took you right through the car, in through the doors on one side and out the other. By this point, the crowds had dissipated, so I was by myself when I got to the car. I just stood there for a while, inside the box car, reflecting on the fact that hundreds of people at a time were in that very space, either sweating or freezing (depending on the time of year), knowing only that the authorities were taking them to some unknown somewhere. I felt the need to touch the wall to make it seem more real. I wouldn't call it a highlight of the tour (you don't call something like that a highlight), but it was the most noteworthy part.

Outside the box car, on the other side, were some actual suitcases that the passengers brought with them, believing that they would need their stuff where they were going. You could still see people's names painted on the outside of their suitcases, so they could find their luggage once they got to where they were going.

Where they were going was also on the tour. They had an actual camp bunkhouse (part of it, anyway), with the bunks inside. Unlike the box car, there was sign on the bunks telling people to not touch them, so I refrained from touching those too. I later saw some teenager leaning on one of them.

There were some relatively positive displays too, such as a section devoted to the resistance groups that fought the Nazis throughout the war. But what really stood out, for me, was a movie they had going towards the end of the tour. It was a series of interviews with people who were there. I caught the end of the segment with people who had been in the camps. Among others, there was a story about an American G.I. in a unit that had just arrived at a camp who happened upon a young lady inmate. He asked her where the other ladies were - she was taken slightly aback at being referred to as something as dignified as a lady, being as she had been treated like a non-human for so long. She led him into the bunkhouse to find other survivors and said a profound Goethe quote that I can't remember now. The story was told from the perspective of the G.I. and of the inmate, in separate interviews. I wondered if either one was aware that the other person had been tracked down for an interview too. It turns out that the two of them got married. It was a nice surprise. There was a very audible murmur among the audience when the lady said that the nice American became her husband. The happy endings were few, but a few did happen.

There were also some temporary exhibits in other wings that dealt with continued anti-semitism and the current situation in Darfour, but unfortunately we were running out of time, so we had to skip those. We had spent 3 hours in the permanent exhibit.

The rest of our DC visit was nice (went to Georgetown) but anti-climatic.