On the tour through the museum today, we started in the legacy of absence art gallery. It was in here that my tour guide, Al, told my group that these people that were killed in the holocaust should be remembered, and remembered as an individual. He went on to repeat this several times, and I began to think that he was pushing it a little much.
That's when we began our tour through the timeline, as I call it I don't remember what its actual name is. Through the tour, I began to fully understand and begin to comprehend why Al had repeated to remember all the people as individuals.
When you read books, learn facts, and read about stories of what happened, you form a general kind of situation. You began to apply this situation in your head every time you hear or discuss this. When this happens, you lose your touch of reality; and your mind is deadened to the actual feelings that were experienced and the pain that was suffered.
Remembering those that suffered during the holocaust as individual people, reawakens that sense in your mind. As I went through the timeline tour, I was able to recover what you lose during book learning at school. The pain and suffering became very real, the rotting boxcar was a great advocate of that.
And yet, I could also sense the hope that they had. Al said that by surviving, those in the concentration camps could stick it to their Nazi captors, and continue to fight to live. And that's about the time when we had the survivor, who's name escapes me, told us her story. With her tale, I was able to start putting faces on those that were killed. Instead of the blank faces that you imagine to be people from book learning, I can finally see faces on those people, and that makes everything so much more real.
The holocaust was before my time. It was before many of those that are around us everyday. Yet, since this visit, I can begin to understand the holocaust through a second hand kind of experience. Al was right, we are most likely the last generation that can hear from survives, and with that we will be able to continue their stories and help people to understand how genocide affects everyone, and why we need to work at preventing this from happening in the future..
Thats funny that Al would say to remember them as an individual when our tour guide told us to remember them as people. Wen went up into the absence legacy hall and she said to remember them as multiple Franks, and multiple Hedwig(I guees Harry Potter's owl was in the Holocaust as well). But i think they should remebered just as regular people that really shouldnt be seen as differently because of this genocide, i mean there were plenty of other genocides but this is the only one that gets the attention, because it is the most recent. For sure this genocide was one of the worst but i dont think the the common person knows half of what we know and they only know that it killed 6 million jews. They dont know about the millions of Soviet war prisoners that were also killed.
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