Introducing the Holocaust 

 A response to the Holocaust Museum by April Casanova-Pizana

Before going to the Holocaust museum I associated the Holocaust with words like war, death, Jews, Nazi, concentration camps, Hitler, and Germany. Any other significance that I can attribute to knowing about the Holocaust is from the movie Schindler's List directed by Steven Spielberg. I can say that I understood the basics of the Holocaust; it occurred during World War I, Jewish people were the target of German Nazis in an effort to "exterminate" the population, and that peoples of Jewish descent were sent to concentration camps and forced to work or die. This is the extent of my knowledge of the Holocaust - just basic facts, names, and dates.

The experience of visiting the Holocaust museum was an enriching one. Besides facts, names, and dates, I was able to examine just a spec of the actual horrific human suffering that occurred in places like Auschwitz and Birkenauld concentration camps.

Upon entering the museum, one is exposed to a dark and dreary atmosphere, and this mood is created rightly so. To the left there are photographs that allude to happier times accompanied by pedigrees of those afflicted by the Holocaust. This gave me a more personable sense of the 6 million Jewish people killed during the Holocaust. To the right was a timeline of events showing the discriminating events in history against those of the Jewish faith. The earliest discriminatory event dated back to Spain 306 when "intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews were prohibited" according to the Synod of Quine. The timeline covers 1600 years of events, but the ones that stood out the most were: "Jews are not allowed to hold public office" (535 France), Jews must mark their clothes with an identifying badge or large hat (1215 Italy), " Jews may not obtain academic degrees" (1434 Switzerland), Compulsory ghettos for Jews are to be established (1267 Germany). I had never thought that the discrimination had begun way before the Holocaust; instead, the Holocaust was the peak and end of the prejudice. Also, while at the museum I read a quote by Hitler, "Some races create civilization and others corrupt it". Furthermore, Hitler compared this theory to Darwin's Survival of the Fittest. He considered the best race to be the Nordic-Aryan-German "master" race. Whenever he felt threatened, Hitler blamed the Jewish race.

Even children were influenced at the time of Nazism in Germany. Propaganda against Jews was geared towards influencing children to hate Jews and support Nazism. On display was an example of a children's book showing cartoon drawings of children saluting German soldiers, with swastikas, in Hitler fashion. In addition, women were given medals for giving birth to at leas three German children (this was to increase the German population while decreasing the Jewish population).

The most compelling information I observed at the museum concerned the suffering that Jewish people endured. In the movie, Schindler's List, I saw dramatic scenes of people suffering and starving, however, because I was fully aware that what I was watching was paid actors, the credibility of the suffering was lessened. This was not the case at the museum. It was very disturbing to view and read about such horrendous human suffering. I viewed pictures of young boys who had their sex organs removed as part of lab experiments. There were also photographs of severely burned children done in lab experimentations. These children had charred skin over a large proportion of their bodies and were still alive with blank expressions on their faces.

Coming off of the train, people were classified accordingly if they were capable of work or not. If directed to the right they were deemed capable of work and were then sent off to be shaved, stripped, their valuables taken… If directed to the left, they were stripped and valuables taken, but they were led to the gas chambers were they were killed unexpectedly.

I also read about how pregnant women were handled. Upon arrival at concentration camps, pregnant women were given two choices: 1) Abortion, or 2) Allow children to be born and then be killed afterwards.

After all of the atrocious things I saw and read about against the Jewish people, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there were rebellions that took place at the camps. One in particular, in 1944, Roza Robeta smuggled explosives to underground. Sonderkommando men used the explosives to blow up a crematorium. Robeta was later hung. I had never heard of the Jewish people showing resistance in the camps.

After leaving the museum, I felt as though I had just left a funeral. It was very depressing to read and see that this travesty existed in our world's history. However, it is a fact of life and to if we do not remember and learn from our history, "we are doomed to repeat it". I now feel I have a better understanding and can empathize with the plight of Jewish people better than before. When I exited the museum, I looked at the front of the building and saw large cement squares lining the surface. I read that each of the squares were symbolic of only a small percentage of the lives lost during the Holocaust. When I saw how far up the squares went, I had a new found respect and sadness for all those who suffered during this horrible event and all of the generations that would be affected as a result.