Identification

The identification card you receive when you get into the Holocaust Museum

It has taken me two days of distance to log this journal entry. Up until this point most of this blog has been pretty factual... here is where we are and what we saw, but few comments about what we felt. The visit to the Holocaust Memorial requires a bit more about what we felt which isn't quite as easy to capture as a photo. 

When you arrive at this museum you are spoken to loudly by security, have your bags and body scanned, drink water from opened bottles to ensure it is really water (think about that for a second), then you are lined up and with many people over loaded into an elevator to go to the the top floor and when the doors open you see what the American troops saw when they liberated the camps like Buchenwald in April 1945. You wait for at least 20 minutes in a crowded space to watch a movie on the rise of the Nazis and you walk down 4 floors of some of the worst history known to mankind. You end in Daniels's story, an exhibit from a child's point of view....what his life was like before, then in the ghetto, then in the camp.

By the time you end this two hour journey, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are closer than you thought to trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. This is a statement not on how poorly the museum is set up, but how brilliantly it is structured. Add that to Day Six of our journey......when friends aren't getting along anymore because of close quarters, missing parents, misinterpreted comments.....and I think it is fair to say it was the most emotional part of the trip. It was a time in the trip to assess who we are and how we react to different situations.

If I had stubbed my toe, I would have cried for several hours and I haven't felt that way in a long time.