Seeing the Holocaust

WASHINGTON, D.C.–On this trip to the capital of the United States of America, I finally corrected an omission of previous trips. I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I had been warned about this memorial to what its brochure describes as the "state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945." This isn’t your typical art or natural history museum. You exit its four heart-rending floors, not so much feeling elated or educated as shocked at what you didnít know and bothered by a conscience heavy with thoughts of why the rest of the world didnít do more at the time to prevent the slaughter of something like 6 million souls.

One remembers, of course, that the world then was preoccupied with a war which engulfed most of humanity and that Adolf Hitler and his goons made it their business to hide the grisly goings-on at the concentration camps from even their fellow Germans.

With the genius of hindsight, many of us who weren’t born then insist we would have spoken out if we had been alive then, but I seriously doubt it. One of the hard questions one sees throughout the exhibition is the role Christians, especially Ca-tholics and, most especially the Vatican, played in making the genocide possible.

In 1944, it is revealed, the United States military, which was already bombing German cities, was informed of the atrocities by Jewish organizations and specifically asked to bomb the ovens and gas chambers of concentration camps conveniently located close to munitions factories. The military refused, citing the unreliability of the intelligence, as well as the alleged folly of diverting scarce vital resources away from the more urgent task of completing a successful invasion of Europe and achieving an early end to the war. Since gassings, burnings of corpses and "medical" experiments by Nazi doctors on live prisoners were still being conducted at those camps, the quite reasonable question is asked how many thousands of lives could have been saved if the Allies had acceded to the desperate request to bomb those instruments of mass murder.

The exhibition at the Museum is divided into three phases over the second to the fourth floors. You start at the fourth and work your way down to the second over a period of two to three hours. Some people stay longer, gazing at the thousands of poignant photographs, viewing historical film and listening to hundreds of personal oral testimonies.

If you can still stomach it after that, there are a couple of special exhibits on the second and first floors. When I visited the Museum, there was an exhibition designed for visitors 8 years or older entitled Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story, a history of the Holocaust from the perspective of a fictional young boy growing up in Nazi Germany Daniel’s story though is based on the writings of young people, some of whom did not survive, and the memories of others who did.

There were other special exhibits. One documented the experiences of some of the American soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy and encountered the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Another organized by the Holocaust Memorial Council’s Committee on Conscience raised a "Genocide Emergency" alert for the Darfur region of the Sudan. The purpose of the latter exhibit, I suppose, is to remind all who are appalled by the Holocaust that genocide still happens today.

The first part of the permanent exhibition documents the "Nazi Assault" from 1933 to 1939. This period covers the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor and the legalization of the persecution of the Jews, from their public humiliation to the official boycott of Jewish establishments and businesses. This too was a period of shame for German media which was used as a tool of government to portray the Jews as bent on financial and political domination of the world, the cause of Germany’s financial collapse and practitioners of brutal religious rituals such as the torture and murder of Christian babies in order to drain their blood for use in weird rituals.

The second part, a truly wrenching and horrifying segment, records the "Final Solution," first the deliberate isolation of the Jews into ghettoes and then their total disenfranchisement by total confiscation of all their possessions and concentration in numerous camps throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied territories in France, Poland and Hungary, among others.

The Final Solution entailed the profound dehumanization of the Jews. They were packed into small rail cars for their trip to the camps – there is a reconstruction of the actual rail car in which more than 100 human beings had to stand for the entire trip – under the illusion that they were merely being relocated. Many of the prisoners had luggage bags containing shoes, clothes and personal necessities such as hair and tooth brushes, scissors and shaving implements. All these had to be left behind, together with the valuable watches, jewelry, furniture and paintings which were simply appropriated by their captors. One of the most striking exhibits is a pile of hundreds of thousands of old shoes owned by eventual victims of the ovens and gas chambers.

The permanent exhibition details the process of their introduction into the camps, which usually started with a German officer simply pointing out who were to die, because they were too old, too young or too infirm to be used in slave labor, or who would live because they could still be utilized for work. Men were separated from women, husbands from wives, parents from children. Most never saw one another again.

The acceptance process carried on the theme of total dehumanization. Men and women inmates were processed together, told to strip to the skin in the presence of male and female captors, whatever clothes they still had on confiscated and striped prison garb issued, shorn of all body hair, "deloused" in disinfectant showers, photographed and assigned to segregated barracks.

(To be continued)