The Holocaust Memorial Experience
A lot of us entered with trepidation.
We’d seen films and documentaries on the Holocaust, and they were too much. The images haunted us, and surely we had learned enough to be informed but could responsibly avoid any more stories from a time in history we did not want to remember and certainly did not want to be able to relate to in any way. “We’ll just stay a minute,” some of us said. “Just to get an idea.”
The purpose of our trip was to familiarize ourselves with the attractions we most often include in itineraries for Washington DC educational tours. Hardly eighth graders or high school juniors and seniors ourselves, we might have presumed there wasn’t that much more for us to learn about this troubling subject. Then, we found that there was so much for us to learn. The stories were still troubling, but the faces seemed more familiar now. It felt right to remember them, to hear them. And amazingly, at the end, there was hope.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum is just that, a living memorial to a terrible era and the people who survived it as well as those victimized by its horrors. It’s as comprehensive a museum as any in this educational city, but it’s one of the best-designed museums of any we visited. A group could certainly spend hours inside, taking in the information and the images through photographs, artifacts, video, and literature. No matter how long you stay, it won’t quite be enough. There’s far too much to see.
Where to Begin
One of the difficulties in a museum as expansive as this one is deciding where to begin and where to go from there. It can be especially overwhelming for group travel tours, deciding whether and how to stay together. This museum solves a lot of these dilemmas for you. Because of our experience, designed at the suggestion of our expert guide, we recommend beginning with Daniel’s Story.
This amazing section was designed and approved by educators of young people as well as child psychologists to present the events of the Holocaust in the way a child can understand and handle. As such, it ends up being the perfect beginning for all of us. There, we walked through young Daniel’s German home – shockingly familiar from the photographs of our own grandparents’ homes, their toys, and belongings. We traveled through Daniel’s Germany, stood in front of his father’s store. Then we followed as his family was moved first to the Jewish ghetto and then to a concentration camp. Through it all we heard of the events in Daniel’s own words from his journal. Daniel was real, as was his diary, and this child’s telling of a horrific era is both palatable and educational for children and adults alike.
How to Take it In
After Daniel’s story, the plan is to ride the elevator to the top of the museum and follow the exhibits around the building and down as they walk you through the three primary seasons of the Holocaust: the Nazi Assault, Final Solution, and the Last Chapter. Three floors are given to these exhibits, with more than 900 artifacts and four theaters offering live footage and eyewitness accounts.
We quickly discovered, you cannot see it all. With limited time at our disposal, we realized we could not even sit through one of the films and still see all of the exhibits. Leave plenty of time for this museum but also know you will have to choose some things to leave out at least on your first visit. Still, the exhibits are so beautifully arranged. You walk through rooms, halls, even railway cars without even realizing you’re being carefully guided from one floor to the next and from each display to the others. Instead you’ll be, as we were, mesmerized by the events, captured by the faces and the stories and the reality of where your own family would have been had you lived in Germany at the time. Would you have been persecuted as well? Would you have been the persecutors?
This is the ultimate goal of the museum, second to memorializing the brave victims of that era. We must learn to recognize hatred and ignorance in our own lives, in our own time, if we are to prevent atrocity like this from ever happening again. The responsibility is ours.
Finally, Hope
The last portion of this amazing museum tells the story of those who fought against the culture of their day and worked toward love and tolerance rather than hatred and bigotry. Because of the history it tells and the lessons it promotes, this museum is a great addition to student theme tours in history, faith, or global change. This is the inspiration to be moved to action ourselves. The museum even opens our eyes to tragedy in our own time, genocide happening even today. What we will do about it, is unanswered question. But the first goal of the museum is to help us at least answer these: Do we see it and Will we care?
