Holocaust Museum Reflection

3. I stood in the boxcar for a couple of seconds, and I looked at the scuffed floor, where the paint was worn down to the wood, and I could really picture all of those people being crammed into the boxcar and sent to their deaths.

At the concentration camps, the Jews and prisoners had high hopes of being free and that the holocaust would blow over within a short amount of time from the time when it really ended. When entering the museum and seeing how the Jews were treated they could feel how the Europeans treated the European Jews and started to feel the way the Jews did and how unfortunate it was. “Suparna is visibly shaken. "It's one thing to know that Nazis murdered millions of people," she says. "It's another to put yourself in their place.

A majority of the exhibit was technology based or was made up entirely of dioramas. It was very interesting to discover that the museum uses a mediated based approach to inform their audience of the events that happened during the time of the Holocaust. To heighten the experience, the museum hands out cards with pictures of Jewish people who were affected by the Holocaust. At the end of the tour, there is a scanner that will reveal the fate of the person on your card. I received Peter Freistadt. Peter Freistadt was born on October 13, 1931, in Bratislavia, Czechoslovakia. With the arrival of anti-Semitic laws in the 1940s, him and his family had to wear the Star of David on their sleeves and a brand. The star branded them for all to see that they are jewish. They were required to hire a non-Jewish man to overlook their family owned business. They were forced to leave their home. Peter Freistadt was one of the lucky few to escape the ghettos, and the horrors that followed. There was one section within the exhibit called "The Hall of Testimony". This is where you can hear the stories of Holocaust survivors. This provides live testimony of the events from the period and semi fills the void that was caused due to the previous lack of artifacts. The Museum honors the survivors in a permanent exhibit titled “Witness to Truth”. The

Genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group. The most famous genocide, conducted by the Germans, is the extermination of the Jewish population known as the Holocaust. There are other genocides such as the Armenian or Darfur genocide, but the Holocaust is the one talked about and studied the most around the world today. Museums exist in Washington D.C, Los Angeles, and parts of Europe that focus primarily on this dark time in history. Vast amounts of books, movies, and documents concentrate on the Holocaust. Why is this chapter, between 1939 and 1945, discussed and examined? The answer lies within people who experienced the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel, Jay Frankston, and Franks Shatz. These men have gone through hell and back, but they believe in one thing. That is, the notion of never again. The goal is to educate future generations on what really happened, so history does not repeat itself. Never again should people of any race, religion, or ethnicity, go through the horrific past of the Holocaust. In their writing, Wiesel, Frankston, and Shatz do a great job using pathos, logos, and ethos to convey their message of never again for future generations.

In this book, the author describes the long process it takes to create a national museum that will commemorate the Holocaust. He covers issues such as, the location of it, the design and construction aspects of the museum building. He informs readers about how they’ve tried to represent the Holocaust through the museum with sensitivity. I will use specific facts from this book to show that this museum was built with the help of many and required a lot of thought into it. I will show that this museum does in fact show sensitivity to an individual.

“Introduction to the Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 27 Apr. 2017, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143. Accessed 11 May 2017.

During the tour, Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitism was brought up as a cause of the Holocaust. There were examples of propaganda artwork. One included a photo of storm troopers outside a Jewish

There was a time where i had a realization about the world i live in. We took a trip to Washington D.C where we went to museums and learned a lot about history but one museum stuck out to me. It was the Holocaust museum. I saw how Jewish people were treated back then simply because of their religion. Their valuables were taken by the Germans, their homes were either raided or taken away from them. They were forced to live in very small ghettos with 400,000 of them. They were killed and beaten on the streets and nazis treated them as puppets. They embarrassed them by making them dance for their own amusement. They were treated extremely poorly whereas the nazis were treated with respect. It made me think about a time where people discriminated against african americans during segregation. Throughout this time, African Americans were treated as second class citizens to white people. They could not use the same water fountains, restrooms, or restaurants and they were stuck with the dirty and gross ones whereas white people were treated respectfully. If a white person was standing and an african american person was sitting they had to get up for the white person.

The Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus is about the horrendous events such as hate crimes that were happening during World War II. The definition of Holocaust from the museum website perspective is “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews and five million other persons by the Nazi regime and its collaborators” (Holocaust and Survivor Defined.). “The term Holocaust comes from the Greek words of “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burn) which was used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an alter” (History.com). The museum has been around for more than 25 years, in Farmington Hills and has been acknowledged by the Wall Street Journal. The museum does not only reflect on the evil, but also the strength and the courage of the victims affected in this genocide. The purpose of the Holocaust museum is to remember those who have passed away and survived, as well as, to teach and inform others about the events. There were many exhibits to choose from such as, the Jewish heritage, the descent into Nazism and the postwar period. The exhibit I will be focusing on is called, The Camp System.

The Museum solely based on facts, remains, etc, from the event given off information, on how Nazis had taken away the Jews rights and lives away. Making objectivity a very important to the article. Within the article it says, “...Showing photos of charred corpses of more than 50 jews killed in Ohrdruf concentration camp…” The author is using descripsion words, giving a greater image of what it may have looked like, felt like, etc. It gives a vivid image of the victims that were burned in the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143. Accessed on 19th April.2017

Going to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. it really opened my eyes to how these group of people was treated so bad but they still kept to their faith and didn’t lose hope. Another thing I thought was interesting that the museum they did was give you an Identification Card of a person and it told their story and short background of their life and at the end it told you if they survived the Holocaust so it was sad at the end to find out the person I had didn’t survive. I think everyone who has the chance to visit the museum because you really see how the Jews were treated before the Holocaust and how they were even treated unfairly in other European countries, not just Germany. Being an African American and knowing what my ancestors had to go through during slavery it shows a lot of similarities like being the outside group amongst a race of people who think they are more powerful than you. However, from the Holocaust, I think the nation has really started to put forth laws that protect the minority racial group.

A little school in Chattanooga, Tennessee with a small idea of collecting paper clips to represent the Jews killed in the Holocaust turned into a worldwide phenomenon. Students in the eighth grade at Whitwell Middle School were learning about the Holocaust and wanted to honor the Jews by collecting six million paper clips for every single one of them. To date they have been sent over 30 billion paper clips from around the world. They have built a beautiful authentic memorial that is located at their school. This memorial best describes and represents this tragic event.

Memorialization of any sort can be a tedious process, but those regarding Holocaust remembrance were particularly challenging given the surrounding social and political controversies that ensued. This is primarily seen through the issue of representation, which consistently played a key role in the creation of both the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., and the Dachau concentration camp memorial. While the Dachau memorial’s conception stages, the designers were contemplating which victim groups to include. For instance, the mayor of Dachau stated, “Please do not make the mistake of thinking that only heroes died in Dachau. Many inmates were…there because they illegally opposed the regime of the day….You have to remember there were many criminals and homosexuals in Dachau. Do we want a memorial to such people?” (Harold Maruse, “Dachau,” 151). With this quote, the mayor implies that the memorial will only be dedicated to those he deems worthy of representation. Likewise, the White House officials orchestrating the American Holocaust Museum also debated a similar notion regarding the inclusion of ethic victim groups other than the Jews. However, Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors believed that commemorating non-Jews was an “…obscene incursion into the boundaries of Holocaust memory by those whose country-men had persecuted survivors” (Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 53). For this reason, and in order to avoid the generation of false memories, these groups

Before I had a general knowing of what happened during the holocaust and what the Jewish people may have been feeling, but after going through this exhibition it made me think more about all of their harsh realities, and that it wasn’t just adults that suffered but it was a number of children that suffered too. One Jewish child talked in her journal about how having to wear the yellow jewish star made people come up to her and make her do whatever they wanted. She called it a stamp that distinguished her from the rest of the population. Another said it was a sign that made them targets for humiliation and violence.