Last weekend, as a closer to our discussion on Anti-Semitism, my class
visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Most of the class had either
been to that specific museum or to a different museum like the one located in
Richmond. For me, I visited this Holocaust museum on an eighth-grade field trip
many years ago. I only remembered a few things about the exhibit. On top of
that, I was only thirteen, so it was hard for me to focus and fully comprehend
the whole museum. Now, I was more mature and eager to understand as much as
possible.

Our professor told us that it takes visitors about two hours to complete
the exhibit on average. We ere given three and a half hours to walk through
before listening to story given by a holocaust survivor. I took my time through
the exhibit trying to read as much as I could. Unfortunately, I could not get
through all of it. In fact, it took me roughly two hours to get through a
fourth of the exhibit. However, I did see many parts of the museum that were
very impactful for me.

In the exhibit were screens that showed short slideshows and videos about that part of the museum. One of them was an electronic list of laws created between 1933-1945 pertaining to Antisemitism. While most of the videos were relatively short, this one was about fifteen minutes long. Some laws on the list surprised me because they were so specific. One of them in particular said, “Jews are banned from buying flowers.” It may not feel important because they are not a necessity, but flowers are a luxury item taken for granted. They help people show love, affection, and support for others. Taking away something as simple as flowers shows how difficult Jew’s lives were before the violence even started.

This museum doesn’t just show the Jews who suffered in the camps, but it
also discusses the Jews who risked their lives to give the others hope. One of
the boards in the exhibit talked about a Jewish poet named Hannah Senesh
parachuted into Navi-occupied Hungary in hopes of starting an uprising. She was
quickly captured and executed afterwards. The day before her execution she
wrote a poem. The following was an excerpt of the poem posted in the museum:

I could have
been twenty-three next July;

I gambled on
what mattered most,

The dice were cast. I lost.

This poem shows how much people sacrificed for this cause. Without Senesh’s poems, we might never had learned her stories. Stories like this, inspire me to write about my life. At the moment, my life is not very interesting. I am just a college student trying to pass her classes. But my voice could be important in history someday. And if I don’t live to tell it, I want people to be able to read my story.