I read The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank when I was 12 yrs old, almost the same age as Anne when she started writing her diary. For me, the diary was an introduction to the truth of the Holocaust. Before then I hadn’t thought about WW II as anything more than another war. Anne Frank’s diary changed that for me.
I started reading up on anything that would tell me more about the Holocaust. I searched for testimonials from survivors, from witnesses. I looked for books devoted to the subject. I saw any movie that dealt with the topic.
So when I came to New York and saw that there was a Jewish Heritage Museum dedicated to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, I absolutely had to go visit it. And I wasn’t disappointed.
The museum’s collection tries (I say try only because it is impossible to compress thousands of years of culture and tradition into one gallery) to give you a peek into the lives of Jews, their way of life, customs, values. It takes you on a journey – one that starts in peace and ends in war.
The museum’s artefacts bring to life what I’ve only read in books and seen in movies. From a yellow Star of David that was once stitched onto someone’s clothes, to a passport with the name changed by the authorities to identify the person as Jewish, to a sign saying that dogs allowed on a leash and no Jews allowed, everything spoke about the Nazi regimes attempts at crushing the morale of the Jewish people.
Photographs lining the walls tell you about life in the camps. They show you men, women and children who are mere shadows of themselves.
All along the gallery there is a time line that marks the ascend of the Nazi regime and the increasing atrocities and systematic annihilation of a race.
There are stories of people asking for help. Of being denied help. Of losing hope. Of death.
There are stories of valour. Of Rescue. Of escape. Of reunion.
At the end of it all, the image which remained with me was not the board games that the Nazis designed and which had children sending Jews to die to win the game, or the ‘Racial Biology’ classes that were introduced in schools to teach children about racial purity, or even compulsory youth camps for young boys to train them in the Nazi ideology.
What remained with me was the 20,000 photographs they had in one part of the gallery of people who were sacrificed in the Nazi ‘experiment’. These were photographs collected by one person in an attempt to keep the memory of the holocaust alive. These were photographs of people not as they died, but as they lived. Full of hope, dreams and life.
It was in memory of the people who were.
I started reading up on anything that would tell me more about the Holocaust. I searched for testimonials from survivors, from witnesses. I looked for books devoted to the subject. I saw any movie that dealt with the topic.
So when I came to New York and saw that there was a Jewish Heritage Museum dedicated to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, I absolutely had to go visit it. And I wasn’t disappointed.
The museum’s collection tries (I say try only because it is impossible to compress thousands of years of culture and tradition into one gallery) to give you a peek into the lives of Jews, their way of life, customs, values. It takes you on a journey – one that starts in peace and ends in war.
The museum’s artefacts bring to life what I’ve only read in books and seen in movies. From a yellow Star of David that was once stitched onto someone’s clothes, to a passport with the name changed by the authorities to identify the person as Jewish, to a sign saying that dogs allowed on a leash and no Jews allowed, everything spoke about the Nazi regimes attempts at crushing the morale of the Jewish people.
Photographs lining the walls tell you about life in the camps. They show you men, women and children who are mere shadows of themselves.
All along the gallery there is a time line that marks the ascend of the Nazi regime and the increasing atrocities and systematic annihilation of a race.
There are stories of people asking for help. Of being denied help. Of losing hope. Of death.
There are stories of valour. Of Rescue. Of escape. Of reunion.
At the end of it all, the image which remained with me was not the board games that the Nazis designed and which had children sending Jews to die to win the game, or the ‘Racial Biology’ classes that were introduced in schools to teach children about racial purity, or even compulsory youth camps for young boys to train them in the Nazi ideology.
What remained with me was the 20,000 photographs they had in one part of the gallery of people who were sacrificed in the Nazi ‘experiment’. These were photographs collected by one person in an attempt to keep the memory of the holocaust alive. These were photographs of people not as they died, but as they lived. Full of hope, dreams and life.
It was in memory of the people who were.
1 comment:
Glad you are having fun. If you like holocaust museum's (I know that is insensitively phased but I can't think of a better way of putting it) , you should visit the one in Berlin
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