18 October - Yad Vashem

I have been to a lot of Holocaust museums in my life, and somehow I always manage to learn some new things!! We were lucky to have Ophir Yarden, our Israel professor, take us around the museum. We spent a little over an hour at the beginning walking around the big memorials and squares.

We sat in the Warsaw Ghetto Square first (red brick, with two relief structures) for a good amount of time listening to Ophir talk to us. The two reliefs contrast each other; the one on the right shows despair, and the one on the left shows resistance. These are placed here because the Jews were first passive and then later they rose up against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. We talked about reasons why Holocaust survivors right after the war might not have talked to their kids or grandkids about what happened. Some never spoke about it at all. We mentioned PTSD, other emotional trauma, depression, wanting to only think about happy things. Ophir brought up something that I had never thought about before. If a survivor were to talk about the what they experienced in the concentration camps, they would say that it was totally unimaginable, impossible to survive, full of death. So...why then, HOW did YOU survive?? 
Was it that bad? 
Did you betray someone? 
All humanity was lost in the camps. Inside the museum, there were plenty of screens playing video interviews of survivors telling stories. One man talked about how he got out of bed one morning and couldn't find his hat, and if he didn't have his at at the lineup outside on time, he would be shot. He made a quick quiet decision, and crept along the feet of all the bunks in his room. He found a hat peeking out of someone else's bed covers and he took it. When they went out for the lineup, he heard one shot and heard a body fall.





This image below is in the Children's Memorial in honor of the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. We walked down a path into an underground room that was pitch black. It took a second for our eyes to adjust, so there was a handrail on the side. There was a deep voice reciting names of children who had died, their names, and where they were from. I felt very disoriented walking through this room with never-ending blackness speckled with these candlelights. The room was designed for you to have a unique experience, which was much so accomplished. It used our senses to touch our hearts.

The architect of the museum wrote a whole book about the design of the building.

At the end, we walked through the Hall of Remembrance. The walls are lined with these binders, full of one-page records of those who were killed in the Holocaust. In the center of the room was a circular opening above you covered in samples of those pages.

We had lunch up on Mount Herzl and then spent another couple of hours listening to Ophir talk to us about modern Zionism and Judaism.

Clayton in front of a pretty olive tree, and Anne Marie in front of a WALL.