Face to Face with the Holocaust- A Museum Journal

Watching The Pianist in an English class was my first true exposure to the events surrounding the Holocaust. I had known of it vaguely as a mass genocide, but never took the time to let its causes and effects register in my mind with any sense of urgency. I remember my feelings of anguish as I watched, scene after scene, the death of different characters at the hands of a dictator devoid of all decency. I remember seeing a Jewish woman being shot at point blank range by a Nazi soldier simply because she asked where he was taking her. Whenever the Holocaust comes up in any context, my mind travels back to that classroom and the eye-opening effect that The Pianist had on me. It is not difficult to understand, then, why visiting a museum where the memories of this event are so thoroughly preserved was one of the first things on my agenda once I arrived in Washington D.C.

At the beginning of a guided tour, participants were given identification cards. Each card detailed the story of a person who lived through the Holocaust. I thought that this was an effective way to begin, because it served as a reminder that real people were involved; people like me, with normal lives, families and friends. It directed us to Elie Wiesel’s profound words: ‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’ For that afternoon, I bore witness to Gertrud Teppich’s story.

As I absorbed the information that each exhibit presented, I couldn’t help but wonder: with all this evidence, how do those who question the occurrence of the Holocaust still find fuel for their fire of denial? I would later learn that anti-Semitism, just as any other form of discrimination, knows no bounds. As if survivor accounts were not enough, the museum relays the harrowing details of the event through short videos, written testimonies of victims, and poignant photos depicting despair. It was jarring to see even physical remnants that were extracted from the sites where they lived and worked: workshop and drafting tools used by workmen, the main door of a hospital in the Lodz Ghetto (one of the many ghettos that Jews were forced into), buttons from articles of clothing, dentures; items which were once seemingly mundane, but which now spoke of futures never realized. Being in such close proximity to these items made me feel connected to the event in an entirely new way.

Expectedly, my eyes welled up as I read about the fate of the innocent and unknowing men, women and children, many of whom were either immediately gassed upon arrival at death camps, or put to work until they suffered the same fate. I learnt about the falsehoods they were fed, such as ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’, which translates to ‘work will make you free’. I observed the steely and emotionless manner of Nazi soldiers as they stripped these people of their basic human rights.

One exhibit that claimed a permanent spot in my mind from the moment I stood in front of it was the box of hundreds of pairs of battered shoes once worn by those who were led to their death during the Holocaust. Above the exhibit is a poem titled ‘We are The Shoes’ by Moshe Szulsztein. It is written from the perspective of the shoes, who are speaking for their owners: ‘grandchildren and grandfathers from Prague, Paris and Amsterdam’. The sight of these shoes stacked on top of each other made me consider the innocence of the people who once stood in them: young girls and boys playing in fields, people like Gertrud, people in love, people who were loved.

Even though I managed to see a considerable amount of exhibits, there are still many that I missed. Needless to say, I will surely be returning to see and learn more, and to bear witness to the other stories preserved there. If there is one thing that anybody can learn from visiting a museum like this, it is that we cannot deny history. We must embrace and learn from it, because it helps to shape and maintain our attitudes about the world we live in; sometimes even more than we are willing to admit.

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