We Must Bear Witness

"I don't want my past to become anyone else's future."

~ Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor

and Noble Peace Prize laureate

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ought to be on the itinerary of every Washington, D.C. visitor over the age of ten, for we all must learn its lessons of respect for others, compassion and responsibility for the marginalized members of our society and courage to confront hatred, if we have any hope for a better world.

Approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis during World War II.  That statistic does not include the Roma (Gypsies), physically handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, nor homosexuals that Hitler's regime also persecuted.  The Holocaust Museum seeks to remember these victims and educate future generations about this dark episode of human history with the hope that such genocide will never happen again.

My husband and I had visited the museum when it first opened in 1993, but my daughter Jillian had never been.  She and I paid a visit to the museum over the holidays and found our emotions deeply touched. 

Lobby's elevators

Visitors are handed a memorial card that gives a brief biography of a Holocaust victim as they wait in line to enter the lobby's steel-faced elevators, disturbingly reminiscent of WWII gas chambers, for the ride up to the museum's fourth floor.  Reading that card, one begins to identify with the victim's tragic story; as the elevator ascends, one begins to feel that victim's plight.

The exhibit begins with the following eyewitness account by General Dwight D. Eisenhower which he cabled to General George C. Marshall, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 1945.  Eisenhower, in the company of Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, had viewed Ohrdruf, the first Nazi concentration camp shortly after its liberation by Allied forces.

"The things I saw beggar description...in the visual evidence and verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and beastiality were overpowering...I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.' "

~ General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe

Viewing the museum's permanent collection, one experiences growing trepidation as you follow Hitler's rise to power and the increasing isolation of his Jewish victims.  Why, you wonder, didn't someone speak out against this madman? 

One learns the history of anti-Semitism from the early days of Christianity when they were viewed as the murderers of Christ through medieval times when they were excluded from trade guilds to 1881 when they were blamed from the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia and into the 20th century when the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion gave rise to the idea that Jews were conspiring to dominate the world.  One of my heros, Martin Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation by hammering his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, peevishly denounced Jews later in his life when he could not convert them to follow Christ.  It is only within the past 50 years that the Second Vatican Council, held from 1962 to 1964, repudiated the charge that Jews murdered Christ and that Lutheran church bodies in the early 1980s disassociated themselves from Luther's anti-Semitic writings. 

With such prevalent attitudes, I wondered what I would have done had I lived under Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s.  Would I, too, have passively allowed such persecution to flourish and thus condoned it?

Discarded shoes of Holocaust victims are poignantly displayed with the words of Yiddish poet, Moses Schulstein, on the museum's third floor where Hitler's Final Solution is outlined.

"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 flesh and blood, each one of us avoided the hellfire."

~ Moses Schulstein

As Jillian and I descended from one floor of the museum to the next, we felt that we, too, were descending into hell.  Why did no one help these people? 

Coming to the "Last Chapter" of the museum, we learned that when a few neighbors did step in to rescue their Jewish friends, the victims had a chance to survive.  The Danes smuggled 7,220 Danish Jews to the neutral country of Sweden, saving 9 out of 10 their fellow Jewish countrymen.  Vienna stage actress Dorothea Neff hid her Jewish dress designer Lilli Schiff in her apartment from 1941-1945 while still entertaining Nazi officials in post-theater parties there.  Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg separately saved hundreds of Jews.  Irene Gut Opdyke,a young Polish nurse, smuggled food into the Jewish ghetto and later rescued 18 Jews by becoming a German major's mistress.  (I read Irene Gut Opdyke's autobiography, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer, when it was first published and highly recommend it.)  The stories of other courageous rescuers are told as well and may be viewed online at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's site.

Finally, we came to these words written by Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister who initially supported Hitler's regime, but later was imprisoned for opposing it:

"First they came for the Socialist, and I did not speak out--

 Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me--

and there was no one left to speak for me."

~ Martin Niemoller

Somberly, we left the museum, reflecting upon our own obligation to promote human dignity around the world and to take a more active role in being a witness.

"For the dead and the living

We must bear witness."

~ Elie Wiesel