March 2000:
Holocaust Museum Report
My visit to the Holocaust Museum was very educational for me. I was there two years ago, but I didn’t get a chance to see everything that I wanted to see. So going again this year I got to see more, but it still wasn’t enough.
This time while I was there I took most of my time watching the videos that they had on display. Last time I spent a lot of the time reading the different pieces of information. I found a lot of things somewhat disturbing to see. I could not comprehend how somebody would come up with ideas like this. The horrors that I saw on the videos were terrible, and to think that mankind did this to its own people. I don’t see how people could live with themselves after doing some of the things that they did to the people.
I was also in awe at the way the prisoners were treated. I never thought that a person could be that skinny and still be alive. The torture that these people were subjected to in the camps was horrible. I saw how dirty and disgusting the camps were and these people were forced to live in them.
I was also able to see the piles of bodies that were found when the various camps were liberated. There were literally hundreds of bodies and those were just the ones that were on piles. Who knows how many were buried in the mass graves or how many were cremated in the crematoriums. This was a brutal and beastly way to treat human beings and I cannot understand how it ever happened.
I also thought that Daniel’s Story was a very good exhibition. It gave a real life experience of one person that people could relate to. I thought that through Daniel’s Story people had a chance to go through and experience, as close to first hand as I would care to get, the real live struggle of what a person really went through in one of the most darkest parts of human history.
I hope to visit Washington again in the future and go to the Holocaust Museum to finish viewing everything that I would like to. I learned a lot from this trip and I wish more people would get the chance to experience it.
N.F.