Remembering the Holocaust

Alison is reading The Diary of Anne Frank in English class. So, for extra credit, we visited the Houston Holocaust Musuem Sunday afternoon.

The design of the museum is inspired by the shape of the crematoriums; it is surrounded by faux barbed wire. The room of the permanent exhibit is wedge-shaped; when you enter and see the story of Jews in Europe in the early 20th century, the ceiling is tall. It lowers as you begin to read about Hitler coming to power and is at its lowest when you get to the photos of the final solution and the camps being liberated.

The exhibit told the story well, mostly through photographs with just a few donated artifacts — Nazi armbands and memorobilia (a baby spoon with a swastika, a children's book with propaganda). The most gruesome photos are in flat display cases — bodies discovered when the camps were liberated, victims of Mengle's experiments. Truly shocking.

There is a large community of Holocaust survivors who settled in Houston after the war. Their stories are told now in one of the rotating exhbits. Many of them gave the money to set up the museum, and their stories are told in a film made up of interviews, which give horrendous anecdotes.

The most recent addition is the donated rail car used to transport prisoners to the camps. It is outside, and as it was a hot day, we immediately felt what it must have been like to travel for hours or days, packed in with up to 100 other people.

It was a sobering visit, one that brought back all the horrors we have only read about, never experienced.

It's good to be reminded from time to time. Just how cruel people can be.