Never Forget

An entire history of the millions of lives lost in one place. six million lives. And that is only the Jews. I had been to a few Holocaust museums in the past., but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. 

The night prior was spent with a Yad Vashem prep. It began with each of us receiving a short story of someone in the Holocaust and a candle, with the candle  being blown out if the story ended sadly. By the end, we were sitting in  dark room, each and every person having blown their candle out. 
The group activities that night were beautiful and eye opening. Little did I know what I would see in the morning. I walked into Yad Vashem. I told myself that it was okay to feel, and to let myself feel, every emotion that came up. For the first two thirds of the museum I saw red. I felt such rage, such anger, towards the people who dehumanized the Jews. They literally stripped them of their identities without hesitation. I had learned about it, grown up with the stories, but this shit was real. I was staring into the faces of those incarcerated, those lost, those murdered in cold blood because of something that they chose to believe in. And I was angry. 

I reached another portion of the museum. Stood and watched a testimony about a woman who watched her sister get shot in front of her. For no reason. And all of the anger subsided, the numbness faded away, and the floodgates opened. I was still, frozen in my place, as the tears rolled down my face. I let them flow. I let myself feel all the sadness and pain, all the suffering and despair, and a part of me reveled in it. I felt more connected to my identity, my Jewish identity, than I ever had before. 

For the remainder of my time in the museum, I continued to cry. I felt every emotion that they felt, opened myself up to feelings I didn’t know I had. There was a shoe. Well, there were a lot of shoes. All in a pile in the middle of the floor. But there was one shoe in particular. It was tiny. It must have belonged to a child no older than four or five years old. I sat there, in the middle of the floor, crying over the spot where the shoe lay. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How could anyone perform such atrocities? How could a human possibly murder another, rape them, kill their families, gas them, starve them, and not care? The only difference between the Nazis and the Jews were their beliefs. By murdering the Jews the Nazis were declaring themselves superior, even though we all bleed the same blood and breathe the same air. And I sat there, thinking about not only those who lost their lives, and those who never really got to live, but those who took all of those lives. Those Nazis who didn’t believe in Hitler’s bullshit, but had to kill anyways or they would be killed. And I wondered what it must have felt like for them to know that they were robbing people of their lives. 

We finished the museum in the last room, looking at the faces and the binders of names of those who perished. There were only four and a half million there, meaning nearly two million still remain nameless. Still remain a mystery. We finally exited the museum and ended in the children’s memorial. It was an unbelievable experience. The feeling that washes over you when you walk through the barely lit room, listening to the names and ages of the children that never got to experience all that life had to offer. In the small amount of time we were in there, I heard of children dying at age four, age two, and age six  months. And I felt disgusted. 

We had discussion following Yad Vashem, all about how it made us feel and what we thought. The general consensus was, “Why?” Why did this happen, and why does this continue to happen, even to this day? If I have learned anything in the past few days of being on this amazing trip, this unbelievable experience, it’s that we, the Jewish people, are strong. We are resilient. And we are sick of taking shit from everyone. Walking out of that museum, walking out alive and in Israel, was the greatest “*** you” to Hitler. Because we proved that we can’t be broken. As long as we continue to stand together, the Jewish people, the Jewish religion, will continue to live on regardless of all the hate in the world. 

I feel so blessed and honored to have been given the opportunity to witness Yad Vashem. I will never forget what I saw, or how I felt, and I will pass it on to my own children. Because if I never forget, the world won’t either.