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Top Student Stories ’11-’12: Beyond powerful
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Written by Sarah Truax, The Eagle Managing Editor
For me, the Holocaust is something that is very emotional. I, along with some of my fellow 11th grade classmates went to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. thanks to our good grades in history for the first semester. The museum takes a big toll on your emotions after you stroll through four floors devoted to the entire process of this tragedy from the very beginning pretty much to the very end. You’re given a passport when you enter and at the end of every floor you are supposed to flip to the next page to find out even more about your person’s experiences—a true rendering of the life and capture of someone ensnared in Hitler’s efforts to eradicate occupied lands of all Jews– and at the end you find out if they survived or if they perished. But remember, each floor has a different reason for being in the museum.
After you get your passport you are put on an elevator that looks like the inside of one of the gas chambers and sent to the fourth floor, where you then go through an experience backwards from what you’d normally think.
The fourth floor is very basic, designed to tell you about how it all slowly came to be and all the different types of people who were involved, from the Nazis to the prisoners. On this floor, I learned that the young people of Germany (non Jews) were essentially forced into different Nazi programs in which they were raised to go into the Nazi army, especially the boys.
The third floor connects everything more personally. It provides videos that were recorded in the camp. It also has one of the real cattle railroad cars that brought prisoners to the camps and you get to explore what had to be cramped, terrible conditions. There’s also the sign that was at the top of one of the gates at Auschwitz that each prisoner would have gone through to go into the camp—Arbeit macht frei—that translates into, “Work will set you free.”
You hear survivors talk about their experiences and see a model of the gas chambers while hearing an explanation of what it would have been like to go through that. There’s a pathway that you walk down and on each side there are hundreds and hundreds of shoes (pictured) that people wore while they were living in the camps. The very last thing you see on this floor are models of the ovens that they would have burned the bodies.
The second floor contains some information about the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust, that features a huge wall that has all the names of the heroic individuals such as Oskar Schindler who helped people escape.
And then the Hall of Remembrance is at the very end of everything before you go back to the first floor. In this very important hall there is the Eternal Flame which was built upon some of the stones and dirt from the camps and so on. You can also light a candle for people who were in your family that died as a result of this horrible, horrible tragedy. Even though some of this doesn’t seem like it would be an emotionally draining tour, it truly is. It is no understatement to say that the National Holocaust Museum is something you need to experience for yourself.
I personally got choked up all throughout the third floor, from the very beginning to the very end of it. I got tears in my eyes watching some of the videos and walking through the train car. One of the things about the train car that really got me was the smell of it. It just seemed like something was wrong in it, the smell and feel of it just bothered me. Then the gate and hearing people talk about their actual experiences.
Then when I entered the room with all the shoes, the hundreds of shoes that were so worn down and some of them were so small, I just burst into tears and ran out. It made things just a bit too real for me, thinking that real people who died a horrible death wore those very shoes. It made it hard for me to walk through what was left.
I ran past the room with the ovens in fear that it would have made everything even worse for me. When I got to the Hall of Remembrance I turned to the last page of my passport. After learning about my person and knowing about how her husband died before they were put in the camps and how she had four kids, one of the boys died as a baby then the other boy and her two girls died in the camps, I found out that she was also killed by being gassed.
I started crying again.
I sat down and stared at the Eternal Flame until I calmed down and we got up and went downstairs. Surprisingly, I want to go back to D.C. just so that I can go to this memorial museum again and have more time to look at some of the things I had to over look and pass up just simply so that we could leave on time.
I’m pretty sure I sound crazy, but I could have spent hours upon hours there looking at every single thing they had to offer, studying everything to its final detail. This trip was well worth it and I suggest that you go too. I was lucky enough to have people go on this trip that were good friends of mine. Anyway, take a trip to D.C. go to some of the museums, including the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, I promise you that you will not regret it.
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