I believe I spoke less words yesterday than on any other day I can possibly remember. I attended a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for Wisconsin teachers set up by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations. Amazingly, the trip is only a one-day endeavor in which we fly a privately chartered jet from Milwaukee to Virginia. In Virginia, we are then picked up by a private bus company and taken to the Museum in D.C. As you can see from the picture above, there were a number of people who attended, but I didn't know anyone personally. I had never been to Washington D.C. before yesterday and was amazed for a variety of reasons. I didn't experience the city in any way besides seeing the memorials from a bus, but I did get a chance to absorb the Holocaust museum.
I say "A Day Without Words" because the museum provoked gasps and chokes and no verbally distinguishable utterances or adjectives during the experience. I have never been to a museum that affected me so viscerally as this museum. I am still left to reconcile merely with images: the 15,000 pounds of hair shorn from victims at Auschwitz and the countless brown-worn leather shoes; the dehumanizing video footage of concentration camps and death centers where bodies are disposed of like refuse in a landfill; the haunting and disorienting cobblestones taken directly from the Warsaw ghetto; the rusty, pale green cans of Zyklon B sitting behind glass cases like convicted felons of the world's most atrocious crime; the psuedoscientific diagrams of racial taxonomies that still plague the subconsciousness of so many in the contemporary world; the rail car in its seemingly innocuous inanimation once filled with desperate cries and diabolical screams; the wall of rescuers ten feet high and 50 feet long, filled on two sides top to bottom with names of heroes; the Danish fishing boat which carried Jews from the shores of Denmark to refuge in Sweden--reminding us that Denmark reclaimed all but 51 of its nearly liquidated Jews. And it continues with the denial of identities embodied in photographs of numbers tattooed in forearms, an all-encompassing photographic history of a 400-year-old shtetl and its inhabitants merely images in history, to the blue and white starched and tattered prison rags worn by the innumerable innocents barred within camp confinements and the partisans and resistors martyred for a nobility forgotten and denied in every regard--a nobility imparted in all to be a human being.
Suddenly shades of grey and ashen black evanesce into an extraordinarily illuminated hexagonal-like rotunda of smooth white stone. The sun shines vertically through its center, and an eternal flame sits in commemoration of millions. I remember being awestruck in the contrast of this room with the exhibit as its anteroom. I have not felt a compulsion to pray in my life like the compulsion I felt at the moment after entering the rotunda. Ironically, my feeling of prayer was not accompanied by any identifiable message and not associated with any particular God.
The surrealism begins to invade me upon leaving the Hall of Remembrance as two Holocaust survivors volunteer to share their stories in the open first-floor staircase. Both have had the tattoos as evidence that they can never forget and have had 63 years of remembrance (61 of them as a married couple). Walking testimonies of hope and memory, they had but one simple message that resonated throughout: "Do not love me, but tolerate me because I exist."
And then I thank the victims for their bravery and willingness to bear all to perfect strangers; we hug, shake hands, and dry our eyes. Within seconds, we are gone from one another, never to see each other again. Within minutes, I am back in the comfort of a private jet eating asparagus and turkey, drinking dark, sugary coffee. Within hours, I am home and in bed, in 2008, grappling in the dark with a blurry and horrifying collage of images I will never forget and likely never fully understand.
