Although it was not exactly a fun experience, attending the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was an interesting, insightful way to spend a Saturday. The permanent, chronological exhibit was very informative and impactful, and the additional two exhibits I toured, the American Witnesses exhibit and the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit, were also well done. Some of the smallest artifacts in the permanent exhibit ended up hitting me the hardest, like the drawings from children during the Holocaust. It is hard to grasp the scale of the Holocaust, but the hallways filled with names of people who died and historically Jewish towns that lost much of their population, as well as the piles of shoes and hair, helped to capture it. The color video footage of the liberation of concentration camps in the American Witnesses exhibit also hit me pretty hard. I think seeing actual videos, particularly videos in color, makes it easier to envision the cruelty in a way we can understand. To me, it feels like there can be a distance in some black and white still images that is not there in color videos. I took journalism in high school, so I’m a bit of a nerd for the news, so I was interested in reading what American newspapers and magazines reported on about the Holocaust, and how they reported it, in the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit. The survivor speaker at the end of our visit was wonderful and I enjoyed listening to her stories.
Throughout the exhibits, I think I picked up on things I normally would not have because of the anti-Semitic texts we read for class and our discussions on them. Hitler’s economic boycott against Jews in Germany makes more sense after having read “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” and Mein Kampf, as do the Nazi anti-intellectual book burnings and the complex blood purity charts.