And Some Still Insist It Never Happened

Thursday, March 10
Anyone who knows me, even slightly, knows of my passion for World War II. Particularly Europe, and most especially Germany, both in the period between WW I and WW II and just after WW II. I have come across many theories trying to explain how it was that a civilized culture like the Germans could have turned into the murderous thugs they became during the war. But they are, and will always remain, just that - theories. It will always remain something of a mystery.

I believe in reincarnation. Even though I think the Catholic Church frowns upon that sort of thing, I just believe in my soul that I have been on this earth before, and I will be on this earth again, until I learn those things that God wants me to learn in order to be able to stay with Him in eternity (there is my own little half-baked theology, right or wrong! Buddhism, Lutherinism, Catholicism, Lynnieism!). My fascination with World War II is because, I believe, my last time on earth must have been during that time, living in that place. And I must have been Jewish.

Of all the places in the world for such a place to be, Dallas has a Holocaust Museum. http://www.dallasholocaustmuseum.org/

And this was the day I participated in it.

Perhaps all museums do this now, but I really liked what they did here. They hand you a set of headphones and a small player. There are pictures and artifacts, like in a regular museum, with numbers by them. You enter the number into the player and it talks about what you are looking at. Much more informative than just reading the picture captions for yourself.
This museum is not huge. So instead of trying to cram a bunch of stuff into a small space, they instead decided to focus on just one day - April 19, 1943 - and the behaviors of bystanders to the Holocaust. They highlight three different events: 3 young men attacked a train bound for Auschwitz, the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in revolt against their Nazi oppressors, and delegates from Britain and America were meeting in Bermuda to ultimately decide that they were going to do nothing to help the Jews of Europe.

The museum was begun by Dallas residents who had survived the Holocaust. What moved me so much about it is that it is not just a recitation of all the horrors done in the name of the Nazi state, but concentrates instead on the morality of what WAS and what WAS NOT done by governments and ordinary citizens. The exhibits ask you to question what you would have done, and to become an "Upstander," or one who stands up for what they know to be moral and right. If there would have been more Upstanders during that time, the Holocaust could never have happened.

Of course, I've come across this idea before, but it never made such an impact on me. Being a visually oriented person, it was probably seeing in person things that I had just read about before. I began to cry when I saw and touched the rail car that had actually been used to transport Jews to their deaths, and I continued to cry when I saw the concentration camp uniform, the hundreds of rings taken from their owners before their murders, the stack of eyeglasses no longer needed.

I cried through the entire museum.


And, at the end of it all, I cried at each name that is memorialized. Those who perished, and those who are still among us. But who will soon be reunited with their loved ones.

We were fortunate enough to have a survivor talk with us. She was not in one of the death camps - her mother was able to get she and her brother out of Germany just in the nick of time. But her testimony was still chilling. She was a young child when they left, but she still remembers the sound of the SS man's boots as he came striding through their train compartment checking papers - she said that she didn't know what it was about them, but once you heard the sound of those boots you never forgot it. And the way she said it, sent a cold chill down my spine.

My original plan was to visit the JFK Museum after this one. I was so emotionally drained, I just walked home. And processed my visit, to use a therapy term.

I would not have missed this for the world! And I do hope that, over my years, I have learned to be an Upstander.