We board the buses and are told we are heading to Yad Vashem. I don't speak Hebrew so I have no idea what this means. I am told it is the Israeli Holocaust Museum. They have worked very hard to document and preserve the history of the darkest chapter of Israel's history in modern times. The world war two era is of special interest to me, but I usually see it from the battle and machines of war perspective. I am no stranger to the holocaust in terms of knowing what it is about and the murderous hatred that was foisted upon the Jews, but I have never seen anything about it up close.
As if we are all anticipating what is ahead, the bus is much quieter than usual. There isn't a lot of happy chatter that characterizes our trips back and forth. Yad Vashem is in the heart of Jerusalem. It is not a long trip from our hotel and we are soon descending the stairs on the bus and walking on the long and expansive courtyards that surround the building.
The architects certainly nailed the interpretation of their building design to evoke a sort of solemness.
It is modern, spare and leads one to observe more than amuse oneself. In the courtyards are trees planted either by holocaust survivors or in their memory. I see one that is planted by Corrie Ten Boom, Oskar Schindler and others that I recognize by name.
There are larger than life sculptures that depict the struggle of the Jewish people through time. They give off a melancholy emotion with the distressed faces and postures.
We are to take a guided tour of Yad Vashem. We are issued listening devices in addition to our little blue boxes that our tour has issued us. As several tours take place simultaneously and it would be very hard to hear your guide apart from all the others.
The inside of the museum is more of the same, bare concrete, thick plate glass, and the same spare sort of design. We meet our guide who speaks very good English and was educated in the US. As we enter the exhibits we are told that what we see are not recreations, but very painstaking reconstructions of the actual buildings, railroad segments, cobblestone streets, etc. We see an actual reconstruction of a part of the Warsaw Ghetto, brick street, steps, building front. There is the actual rail line abutment where the end of the rail road ended inside Auschwitz which was the end of hope for many Jews. There were actual truck chassis on which the bodies of dead Jews were placed and rolled to mass cremations. We walked over sections of the floor where revealed by glass panels thousands of shoes worn by the victims of the concentration camps.
The layout of the exhibits are designed to show the progression of the kind of brainwashing through propaganda. The large posters showing absurd caricatures of Jewish people with hawkish and frightening features or bold type denouncing the evils of the Jewish race. Some cartoonish drawings show Jews eating children with evil delight and other offensive and revolting depictions. There were the actual lists of Jews from Oskar Schindler's "Schindler's List".
Other collections included simple toys, drawings of concentration camp buildings, a handkerchief, a small book, a bicycle.
I wonder what I would try to take with me if forced to leave all I knew behind that wouldn't catch someone's notice. I can't think of anything. Then there are stories of survival. Hiding in latrines, hiding in attics and behind false walls. Families split apart, indignities, vulgarities, unspeakable wrongs.
When I am just about to my limit of absorbing the abominations of man's hatred, we move to another museum inside of the museum. It is the Hall of Remembrance. It is a round room maybe 60 feet across with rows and rows of shelves that go ever higher and higher that contain file boxes of individual stories of holocaust victims and survivors. There are portraits of individuals, families, people who once lived and are now gone. Inside each box is as much information about each individual as can be found, names, birthplace, occupations, connections. It is an on-going work to keep adding information when it comes to light. Some is sent from other nations when a holocaust survivor dies and their heirs discover hoarded information or artifacts.
I recently ran across an article about this very part of the museum. If you click on or cut and paste this http to your browser, you can bring up a great article about this very work:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/09/14/holocaust-experts-work-to-preserve-wwii-era-items/?intcmp=latestnews
We pass out of the main building of Yad Vashem and to the Children's Hall. This is quite different. It is dark with only small lights that are prismatically reflected over and over so there are hundreds of small lights seeming to float in the dark. In the darkness the names of over 2,000 children are spoken as you walk along the path. The impact is great and I think of the millions of aborted children our own country throws away never named, never remembered. God forgive us for our own holocaust.
We emerge from the darkness into the brilliance of mid day. I am deeply absorbed in thought and emotion which contrasts so greatly with the beauty of the grounds and the sunlight. It reminds me of when my wife and I went to see "The Passion of the Christ" in the theater. At the end there was not a sound from the audience that packed the room. We all filed out and at least in our car hardly a word said as the impact of what we had experienced was too overwhelming for casual conversation. As was the case with most of the places we had toured, there was not enough time to see it all. Again, I could have spent the entire day at Yad Vashem.
Our tour guides planned our day well. As it was nearing lunch time, they had something special planned that would not trivialize what we had just experienced but it would lift our spirits in a really positive way.
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