https://www-tc.pbs.org/auschwitz/learning/guides/reading1.4.pdf
I got the chance to visit the Holocaust Museum through my FSEM, which I’m writing this blog post for. I’d never been before, and I felt that it did the events of the Holocaust justice. To be honest, I don’t have that much background knowledge on the Holocaust, only what I’ve been taught in school. Going to the museum, what little I did know was taken from the pages of a textbook into an immersive environment. The voices of survivors, videos of Nazi soldiers, and handwritten letters from victims presented me with a kind of reality that you can’t begin to understand when learning in a classroom.
Inside the museum, it becomes at least a tinier bit easier to break down that each number in the death toll represented a person, with a life that was rich, complex, and every bit as intricate and important as my own. The horrors that these people suffered are unimaginable. In a museum that tells about the darkest moments of human history, I think that it also reminds us of humanity’s capacity to feel. In no way do I mean to glorify the despicable treatment that these humans faced, but I am reminded of people’s strength, beauty, and incredible depth even as they face horrors unlike any other. What impacted me the most was the writings of survivors. The words of David Graber had a heavy influence on me. He was 19, barely a year older than me, and he knew that he faced certain, gruesome death. I am amazed at his ability to carry himself with grace while enduring true evil. Graber and his friends and colleagues knew that their stories were worth hearing. He held some kind of hope, at least for remembrance of what he suffered some time in the future.
“I would love to live to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to the world proclaiming the truth. So the world may know all… May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened and was played out in the twentieth century… We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.”
The Holocaust Museum serves its purpose for me, in making sure that Graber’s words are memorialized and spread to all that will listen. I sincerely hope that his words and what he endured were not in vain, that we may at least come to appreciate the shared humanity in each and every one of us. I hope that Graber is remembered in the way he hoped to be and deserved to be, and I am proud to be a human alongside him. Even in what can certainly be called the darkest of times, human resilience, strength, goodness, and love could still be found. I’m inspired by the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. I hurt for them in a way that will never live up to the hurt that they themselves experienced. I take responsibility on myself to remember the words of these people, and to prevent what happened in the Holocaust from happening again (although I fear it already has, multiple times.) Humanity, in every sexuality, skin color, gender identity, you name it- is still humanity.