So please excuse my might-be less-than-professional writing. I’m going to venture to tell you about my day, and everything leading up to it, despite my half-asleep status.
And the story begins:
I recently read a book that was suggested to me by my Kindle called “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It’s basically a novel depicting the experience of William Dodd in Hitler’s pre-war Germany. Now, what makes this book even more compelling is that it’s a new slant on a story that’s been around since liberation in 1945. We see pre-war tyranny, anti-Semitism, and free-speech-clamping through Dodd, who just so happens to be the American Ambassador to Berlin.
This book is what made me react to the Casey Anthony trial and result the way that I did: praising America rather than condemning the Pinellas County jury. For I live in a country where all are innocent until proven guilty, and I steadfastly believe that that is a gift that should not be criticized. I cannot imagine what Hitler’s pre-war Germany must have been like precisely because I live in America, where my speech is my right and my religion is my own decision.
I celebrated my citizenship by going to the National Holocaust Museum in D.C. today. I arrived at 9:30 to wait outside for a timed-entry pass. The museum opened at 10:00, and luckily, my pass was for 10:15, so I basically went straight into the permanent exhibit.
I have spent a lot of my life studying the Holocaust of my own accord. I am not sure why I find it so fascinating, but I always have; I remember being 13 and learning about Dr. Mengele, who performed heinous experiments, or “studies,” on sets of twins. I remember seeing pictures of emaciated, spiritless bodies stacked into ditches. Of Gestapo leaders holding a gun to a live man’s head and knowing that, seconds later, his life was eradicated by a bullet.
So, to me, the Holocaust museum wasn’t particularly staggering. There are a few moments when I did have to hold my breath, though. When I walked through a cattle car with two tiny windows that let in negligible light and tried to imagine myself stuck within a heaving mass of 99 other people, all sweating, all stinking, all crying. When I saw some pictures of experiments on living humans done to concentration camp victims. When I met a survivor and she handed me a picture of her six-year-old little brother who managed to survive the horrible journey in the cattle car only to be sent in a long line of humans, some young, vibrant, filled with vitality; some old, wise, and filled with memories – to be gassed.
When I saw the exhibit below, of personal artifacts – prosthetic limbs, mainly – that were brought in suitcases by these people who believed, due to Nazi propaganda, that they were being relocated - for some reason, that hit me as being exceedingly real.
Photography inside of the exhibits is not allowed, so this isn’t the best picture. But walking into this portion of the exhibit also affected me:
The poem on the wall reads:
We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire
– Moshe Szulsztein, Yiddish Poet
I entered the museum at 10:00 a.m. I left the museum at 4:00 p.m.
Then I needed some happiness, so I went to the Dupont Circle Park to read a book
Ironically, the book written by Jaycee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped at age 11 and found at age 29.
I feel as if I learned some important lessons today. As my horoscope said I would. I learned never to underestimate the small, ugly men. So many people underestimated Hitler – so many Americans underestimated Hitler. We can’t just blame it on the other countries.
I learned that I am not brave.
People like Hannah Senesh are brave. In an act of Palestinian resistance, she joined the Army and parachuted to her native home of Hungary, hoping to infiltrate the Nazis and bring relief to her fellow Hungarian Jews.
She was captured by the Nazis and was tortured, but remained respected in prison because she refused to reveal details of her mission to the Nazis. She was sentenced to death.
She wrote a poem while in jail, the end of which goes:
I could have been twenty-three next July;
I gambled on what mattered most,
The dice were cast. I lost.
After I read this, I thought for a second. “What would I do?” I wondered, if people I could relate to were being tortured, systematically mass-murdered, and persecuted for no real viable reason? “Oh, I would do something,” I thought. I wouldn’t just stand by and watch a genocide happen. How could the world ever do that again?
But then I look to Somalia, and I know. I know that I am not brave.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame
- Hannah Senesh
I do remember what Anne Frank said, too, though. “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death.”
“Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. Think of all of the beauty that’s still left in and around you and be happy!”
Happiness I saw in Dupont Circle today:
And that’s the way the hippo heckles.
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