Yad VaShem - The Holocaust Museum

 Itinerary Change - happening quite often

Hello all,
From Anna-Lee-
I did it! I did not think that I would be able or allowed to do this museum. It has age restriction where you can't go ten or under. We had originally planned that my mom and I would explore the grounds and look at the garden of the righteous gentiles. 
Our group leader though said that my mom should definitely go and that he would wait with me, my mom said that would be fine. I also said that was fine as I know their family personally (their family own Arise School of Dance). But somehow the word got out to someone who had recently been and he said that it would be fine for me to go. It is not that gruesome it is mostly telling about how it came to be and how it ended. 
Now I will give you my view of things, my views might be different than most peoples but that is because I am young. I got most of it but I also found things touching mostly about the people. the children who suffered great loss and struggles. 
How the museum is built is truly amazing Interested in architecture I found how much it can mean to people. You walk in and see a longish hallway - at the end there is a movie slide thing playing. It shows the Jews in Poland before the war, how happy they were and how painless life was for them. Then you walk a bit to a hall where they have two murals with piles of dead body`s all skinny, wounded, and some even with bullets stuck in them. That part shows the end of the war and all the Jews that had died because of being murdered. 
You then enter the first room having some sort of understanding of how a dramatic change occurred to the people in Europe. There in the first room you see Hitler being elected you see people cheering and shouting Heil Hitler, and long live Hitler. You then walk into the next room and see Hitler starting to hate the Jews and just the beginning of the murder. You see him taking them to ghetto type places to keep them away from all other people. 
In the next room you see the Nazis start to do their rounds taking more and more Jews you see them get more and more mistreated as the war goes on. The next room really hit me it was the room that they started to make death camps and concentration camps. Here is where you see people with nothing, they are wearing their striped pajama "uniforms" but it is caked with blood and mud. You see people with guns aimed right at them. Something I had forgotten is that the Jews would actually dig their graves and then be shot and put in right after they finished. They had TVs with people talking about their life at the camps. They were telling of the horrors how they would have to steal bread from others to be able to live. One man said that he lost his hat and if you don`t have a hat then the Nazis will kill you, so he stole someone else`s hat and witnessed that person dying instead of him.  I did not understand what this lady said except that she was shot in the head and did not die. Of course she pretended she was dead until the Nazis left but yes she did not die. 
The next room you see Auschwitz and all the other camps, you see the 500 pairs of shoes that were found in Auschwitz, and a real uniform that someone wore. the uniform was made out of leather like rough fabric and the coat that they would have been given had the star of David on it. 
The next couple of rooms show the good guys slowly defeating the Germans and the war being over you see the people that defeated the Germans going into the camps and finding all those dead bodies all the sickness and uncleanliness. 
At the end you walk out and see Old Jerusalem and New Jerusalem with all the children playing people just doing what they need to do going to work, buying supper, and cleaning their houses.

Right now we are back at our hotel. We have the rest of the day off and tomorrow we are headed out for a full day touring. We are going to the Mount of Olives, and we will also see a sound and light show. That sounds interesting!
I am glad I could write lots because I am not tired or not very tired yet. I hope to be able to tell you about the Mount of Olives tomorrow.
Anna-Lee
 
There are so many things that you would never do now that they did back then.  

From Linda
It is amazing to read the Anna-Lee's impressions because otherwise I would not know how impacting this museum had been for her.

She is right that the architecture added to the experience. The museum is like a long pathway through darkness, narrow, unending, and no way out. Once you start you cannot get out until the end.
We could only take photos outside so there are few pictures in this blog.
Yad VaShem - meaning hand and name. Taken from Isaiah 56:4-5
 
“I will give them in My house and in My walls a place [to memorialize] their deeds, and thus their name (“shem”) [will be continued].”

This museum, although a history lesson to the extreme, is personal. It treats each person who died in the Holocaust as an individual - rather than an event that caused the death of 6 million. It also has recordings of testimonies of Holocaust survivors - each with their story. Very powerful.

This is the path to the Children's memorial. The sculpture represents children who's lives have been cut off as they are broken off pillars.

The Children's memorial was a pitch dark room - you hang on to a bar as you walk around it, and listen to a person speak the name of a child, give the age and country they were from. Each child named died in the Holocaust.I said it was pitch black. Well, not quite. They had candles lit with mirrors all around to make it look like over one million candles. A million and a half children were killed.

There were some national points of light in the main museum as well. Very few, but that makes them seem that much brighter.  A Bulgarian Greek Orthodox priest who refused to hand over Jews to the Nazi's and saved many.
Fishermen from Denmark who hid Jews in their boats and helped them escape.
Finland handed 8 Jews over and then said no more.

Our tour guide asks the question what would we do? His answer I found was very good. How do we handle the little moral choices each day. If we can't handle the little moral decisions, we would probably have succumbed to the Nazi pressure too.

The trees you see in the background are oaks. Each one planted for a righteous Gentile. One who sacrificed to protect the Jewish people. Each has a name plaque. Interestingly, the two that were right here where we started were both people Anna-Lee and I had read biographies about before we came to Israel.