The Holocaust Memorial Center

“	Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.	”
—Joseph Goebbels, 1938

That same day we visited IKEA, (my son, my sister and her daughter and I) visited the Holocaust Museum.

It was a moving experience. No admission is charged. It is a very quiet place, and rightfully so.

NO cameras are allowed, all cell phones were to be turned off. That fits with the solemn and respectful occasion that visiting this museum is.

The building was made to look industrial and that is to make one recall the buildings (specially built and put up fast by the Jews!) in which they gassed the millions.

The REASON FOR GAS, we learned, is that shooting and killing massive amounts of humans proved to be a dirty, messy, "demeaning" and stressful job for those in the SS that were required to do it.

So, a faster, cleaner method of killing the unwanted people had to be devised. It's appalling how fast this method came to be, and how quickly those buildings were put up!

(I cannot imagine the meetings that took place discussing the best method to do away with this "messy" mass killing.)

There are railroad tracks out front that remind us of the trainloads of Jews that were driven to their miserable existence (and most likely their deaths from hard labor and slavery) packed in those boxcars like sardines, treated worse than animals. Inside the museum was a replica of a train car they would have traveled in. We saw photos of long, terrible marches that took place in the dead of winter where many of those didn't make it to their horrible destination, they died on the way.

It's not an pleasant trip, but very educational, and sobering. I'm not sure if our schools even teach about the holocaust in any great depth any more, but they should, absolutely.

And as one of the sweet elderly ladies we visited with in the museum gift shop said to our children,
'IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN."

(Those words chilled me to the bone.)

You want to hope it doesn't, but it shows the nature of man to want to BLAME someone or some race for their "troubles", and it proves what can happen when too much power is invested in one man and his radical, wrong ideas. It shows how far off track we can get when we follow along in a MOVEMENT and stray from our long-held beliefs and fail to keep our eye on the compass of TRUTH.

You can do a self-guided tour, or you can wait until a docent can guide you through, one time of the day. Then, toward the end of each day a holocaust survivor comes in to talk to groups that have finished their tour.

Now, sadly, we did not get there at the proper time for the docent, nor that day did a survivor show up. BUT...I would highly recommend using both the docent and making sure a survivor would be on hand to answer questions.

It was a moving experience, especially for our kids. I don't think they ever realized HOW MANY people went to die in such huge numbers. Some of the photos were hard to look at, the cruelty too much to comprehend.

Most touching was the wall on our way out that listed each and every site (in MANY countries!) where the Jews were killed and how many in each camp and how many in each country. It was unreal. At this monument was an eternal flame.

The kids also could stand and listen to recorded firsthand stories of children (now quite elderly) that were separated from their parents and their whole families to be rescued by families in England.

There was a wall of responsibility from which we learned how news organizations and respected institutions were held up to scrutiny for their refusal to acknowledge that this was happening and tell the story of the torture, experiments and mass slaughter taking place all over Europe. There was a place to read about the deliberate blind eye turned to the reality of this happening by those around the world, including the press, world and religious leaders, and yes, even the United States turned their backs on this for a long, long time.

A very sobering experience this was, but one that is especially meaningful. Our kids learned about the harvesting of fillings from the teeth, the scientific experiments performed live on these victims, their dissections after their deaths, and the way the people were starved and worked to death, and then stacked like cord wood when they were starved, sick or too weak to live any longer. It's raw, emotional and it was REAL.

It is an experience that shows what can happen when APATHY takes over a country. It is a place that reminds us that INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS are always the first to go in a direction that takes us where we DO NOT WANT TO BE AND SHOULD NOT GO.

First they were labeled, then limited to the ghetto, they had curfew, told what jobs they could and could not do, who they could and could not interact with. From there it moved on to the unthinkable, and it was ALL VERY FAST in about the space of fifteen years or less from inception to liberation.

If you have a Holocaust Museum near you, visit it, take your children, I think you will be glad you did. Our kids experience while there was very emotional for them, but at almost 13 and almost 14, I think they were ready for the reality of what happened.

“ We heard a loud voice repeating the same words in English and in German: "Hello, hello. You are free. We are British soldiers and have come to liberate you." These words still resound in my ears. ”

—Hadassah Rosensaft, inmate of Bergen-Belsen