Today our FSEM class took a trip to the Holocaust museum in DC. I had personally never been to this museum before so I was interested in getting to go through it for the first time. I, of course, learned about the Holocaust throughout middle and high school. But like most things in history, I feel like it was very censored and didn’t truly showcase everything that happened.
Right off the bat, we were handed ID cards for the victims. It gave a little biography of the person and then a small timeline of their experience throughout World War II. After that, we were led up to the top floor of the permanent exhibit. As you go down the floors, you go in chronological order timeline of history. We stepped out of the elevator to be immediately met with a gruesome image of a pile of burnt body remains. I can tell you now, that I had never seen such a graphic image in any of my history textbooks that taught us about the Holocaust. This already pulled my emotions out and I just felt this dark energy. There was just so much information to take in at the start, I felt like it was hard to take it all in at once, so I tried my best to take my time going through everything. There were so many parts of the exhibit that educated me with new information I had never learned before. One thing that I learned was an encounter a survivor from the Sobibor extermination camp had told. He had said that around the Jewish holiday, Hanukah, 10 of the prisoners at Sobibor were praying and attempting to celebrate but were caught and hung upside down on poles, covered all over by oil, and burned alive. I can’t even put into words how that makes me feel, but to know that other prisoners were forced to watch and some survived and had to live with those images. After getting through all of the permanent exhibits, they also had a temporary exhibit as well. The current temporary exhibit is called Americans and the Holocaust. While I really didn’t find this exhibit as interesting as the permanent one, there were a few things I did find interesting. There were signs throughout that had polls from around the time the Holocaust was happening. Some were asking Americans whether we should’ve gotten involved in WWII or if we should let refugees into the US. The shocking winning vote was no! This just seems so selfish in my opinion. Why would you not want to help victims who just went through one of the worst experiences a person could go through? I truly just did not understand it. Overall, I really did appreciate this museum’s effort in really educating people authentically about the Holocaust. I learned a lot of new information about what happened and would highly recommend that everyone needs to go to be better educated on history.
