Yad Vashem is the Holocaust History Museum, located here in Jerusalem. It is situated on beautiful landscape, overlooking the Jerusalem forest on one side and the city on the other. The grounds are impecably tended and covered with monuments.
I had three and a half hours but did not do the exhibits justice, only having time to skim some, while standing for extended periods at others. I'm still processing the visit. I wandered through, looking at pictures, watching videos, reading personal accounts realizing it did not seem real. Reminding myself the people in the images were at one time as real as the Jews standing beside me at the exhibit. Someone once wore the thinly-woven prison uniform, someone once wore the shoes from the pile on display.
I visited the musem yesterday afternoon. I'll share a few of the accounts I read/watched that were the toughest to see/hear. I was able to snatch a few pictures before realizing pictures are not allowed. But the other pictures (black and white) I provide I've copied from the Yad Vashem website and are those that struck me strongest.
I began at the Children's Museum, which provides accounts of how children were housed, educated, protected and hidden during the Holocaust. Stories mimicked that of Anne Frank, who wrote in a diary of her time hidden in her father's office. They lived with their families in chicken coups, terrified that the next raid would reveal their hiding spot and true identity. Children were sent to Christian families and church-run orphanages, had their names changed, and were often converted to Christianity as a means of protecting them. Display cases showed the meager toys the children had: stuffed toys the size of my finger, homemade chess boards and dolls. The dolls were fantastic - not only a prized possession of little girls, but "safety deposit boxes" for their families. Kids were taught to read with whatever books could be found (Anne of Green Gables was mentioned in one personal account). What was inspiring here were the accounts of how well the children in hiding were treated. Despite their fear, they knew love and consistency, even in their hardship.
In the main exhibit hall, videos play every 30 feet or so, documentaries of survivor accounts. One woman relayed how after her mother was shot and injured, she was rescued by a man who hid her in a bag of coal to smuggle her out of a ghetto.
Images showed people so emaciated every bone in their body protrudes. Survivors told of how their hunger was so great they would dream of eating in their sleep, clutching their only possession in the camp -- their soup bowl. They began to live for soup.
Models of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration/extermination camps were available. You could see the train tracks leading into the camp, from which men and women were separated, stripped, all body hair shaved, and then marched on their final "death walk" to the gas chambers and crematoriums.
A video of a former SS officer's experience at the camp was incredible. He described his role in ushering women and children into the gas chamber. How the commanding officer of the chamber would listen for the end of the screams and cries of those inside. He described how it took 25 minutes for people to die. Because the gas was generated simply from an engine, and was not 'poisoned,' they literally choked and suffocated to death. When they finally opened the chamber doors, the women would still be standing up, so tightly packed into the room they wouldn't shift position until the first person literally fell down. He spoke of how every person would give a final gasp as the gas escaped their lungs. He relayed all of this matter of factly, but not unmoved by his own role in the horror.
Pictures of people being killed and those already dead were the most difficult to make sense of in terms of the reality of the events. People took the time to document the death! Pictures of a mother standing alone in a field, her back to a soldier who's gun was pointed at her head as she tries to shield the child in her arms. Pictures of men and women digging ditches they would themselves stand in to be shot. Pictures of naked women standing in a row inside the ditch waiting to be shot. Video of bulldozers moving wrecked bodies into a mass grave.
Also as striking, were the post-liberation images of mass grave sites, each marked with how many bodies were discovered within: 5000, 2000, 800...
The final room in the museum is Hall of Names. Six hundred pictures and "pages of testimony" stand in honour and memory of the 6,000,000 men, women and children killed in the Holocaust. Over two million pages are stored in the Hall. The shelves are lined with black books containing the pages, as well as empty shelves, which stand in wait to pay tribute to those who remain unidentified.
Victims did not receive a proper Jewish burial. The pit in floor, filled with water stands representative of a grave to those who died. When you look into the water, you can see either your own face or the reflection of the faces above looking down.
Faces and pages of testimony, black binders and empty spaces.
The water at the bottom of the opposing cone, reflecting the faces from above. The cone is carved out of the rock of the mountain.
As you enter the Hall of Names, this quote by Benjamin Fondane, murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, is written on the wall:
"Remember only that I was innocent
and, just like you, mortal on that day,
I, too, had had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy,
quite simply, a human face!"
