I visited the museum with a friend of mine recently and almost immediately we were welcomed in by an older gentleman that gave us the run down of the place. He spoke softly, almost as though the museum itself was a grave site. He told us what we should expect to see as we walked through the building. He also told us to pay special attention to the plaque that defined what the Holocaust was just outside of the glass doors that would lead us into the exhibit.
Obviously we both had a basic knowledge of what the Holocaust was and what we would see in the exhibit, but we respected the mans wishes and read the plaque carefully. The plaque set the tone of the occasion and caused a new found respect to wash over us.
The first thing we saw when we walked in was a multitude of pictures adorning the wall to our left. They were pictures of Jewish families and children that most likely died as a result of the Holocaust and already I became emotional. On this same wall were more plaques that told the experiences of a handful of Holocaust survivors. It was odd to see a wall that memorialized death but also showed a brighter side---> That people actually survived.
The rest of the exhibit seemed to be in chronological order starting where Hitler took over and ending in Liberation. Throughout this excursion I came across alot of disturbing things--The kind of things they don't teach you in history books and images you wish you had never seen.
Nothing really surprised me until just before the liberation portion of the exhibit where we came upon pictures and information on the medical experiments done by German physicians during the Holocaust. The one picture I remeber the most was a picture of about four or five children with burns all over their bodies. well a "burn" is not what these children suffered from really; they were completely covered--up to the neck-- in black, their bodies already heavily malnourished. I was--and there's really no other world for it-- pissed. I just couldn't believe that they would intentionally BURN children. What purpose could they possibly have had? I just imagined some random german physician sitting around one day asking himself "Are Jewish children fire retardant?". NO THEY ARE NOT. WOAH! Scientific breakthrough.
After walking through the Liberation and Nuremberg trials exhibit, we stuck around to watch a thirty minute documentary of a few Holocaust survivors. These experiences would traumatize even the strongest among us. One women recalled a day when she witnessed an SS officer literally throwing a womens baby to the ground, picking it up, and putting it in a sack. It was strange how shocked I was at this. I knew Nazis were evil but that was just too much. I'm an agnostic, and yet for those few moments I believed in Satan and in Hell...apparently both have resided in one form or another on this Earth.
