This past weekend, our class took a trip to DC to visit the Holocaust Museum. I had never been before, so I was quite interested to see what it would be like.

When we first got there, we were all handed an Identification card for a person who lived during the Holocaust. Even just standing there reading through that card felt terribly somber, so I knew what was to come would not be easy to take in. To get to the beginning of the exhibit we went up in an elevator that played a short video. There was a strange, anticipatory feeling in the elevator after that video ended; I wasn’t sure what to expect. I honestly don’t think anything could have prepared me for the elevator doors opening on an image showing a pile of burnt bodies, next to a sign that read, “The Holocaust”. It automatically brought tears to my eyes, and I stood in a sort of shock for a second before entering the exhibit. Right away, they present you with a ton of information on both the rise of Hitler and the rapid spread of anti-semitism in Europe. As you move along, you can see how the Jews steadily lost everything – from their jobs and businesses right down to their rights and identities. There were many parts of the exhibit that taught me things I had never known before, such as the practice of euthanasia on physically and mentally disabled children and adults. As you continue on, you eventually get to the part of the exhibit dealing with the concentration camps. It was an extremely difficult experience, seeing the conditions that the prisoners were forced to exist in. The cattle cars they were transported in, the small bunks that multiple people were forced to share, bricks from the quarry that they were forced to haul for work, even a diorama of the steps taken in the process of death by gas chambers. This part of the museum has installations such as the piles of shoes, possessions of the late prisoners, and a tall room with pictures of victims. While everything in this museum was deeply upsetting, I feel that these parts especially invoked a lot of emotion. I felt that the people were pulled out of the past and materialized in front of me through these pieces of their lives. It really made me realize how much schools dehumanize the victims of the Holocaust and lump them in with the event as a whole. As I am sure many others can attest to, the footage of the liberation of the camps was one of the most horrifying things I have ever witnessed, and will stay with me for the rest of my life. Another thing that stuck with me was a part of the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit. Seeing the statistics of the amount of Americans who simply did not believe that the country should help refugees or get involved with the war in any form shocked me. While I understand not wanting to get involved with the war in some respect, being averse to lending a hand to people who would otherwise be in grave danger and turning them away to be sent to their deaths will never make any sense to me. All in all I thought this was an extremely well done museum, and everyone could benefit from seeing an account of the Holocaust that isn’t as watered down and glossed over as the account that we are taught in schools.