Last week I went to the Holocaust Museum. It is much smaller than the one in Washington D.C., but no less powerful. They had quite the collection of interesting artifacts.
I was not able to take photos within the exhibits, but I took notes of the things that I found to be interesting, or moving:
A German passport stamped with a big “J” to identify the person as Jewish,
A baby spoon with a Swastika engraved in it,
Propaganda books for children. There was a photo with a caption that read, “He who fights against the Jews wrestles with the devil,”
Cobble stones from the Warsaw, Poland ghetto,
A deportation notice from a Benjamin Wassermann, donated to the museum from Wassermann himself, (Could you imagine holding on to that all those years?)
A Zyklon B gas canister that was used at Auschwitz, (Zyklon B is what was used in the gas chambers)
And perhaps most moving of all, was the soil from camps in the memorial room, with the inscription “The soil from these six concentration and extermination camps contains the ashes of those who perished in the Holocaust.”
One thing that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life is an image taken by one of the liberators at the Buchenwald concentration camp: It was a photo of the crematorium, and you could see rib cage bones still intact among the ashes.
Outside, there was a rail car like one of the ones that would have transported the Jews to the camps, and a Danish fishing boat like the ones that helped the Jews escape to neutral Sweden.
I am interested in the Holocaust, so I am always trying to learn about it. After being to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. three times, I have to admit that I expected to not learn anything new. I was wrong though. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that college students at the University of Munich formed a resistance group called The White Rose. The leaders of the group were executed. I’m really glad to live in a world today where we have the freedom to protest.
Texas Tales 