This Train Revised (Indigo Girls)

Our first destination in DC was the Holocaust Museum. Of course it was remarkable, wrenching and overwhelming.
We arrived just in time for a series the museum is presenting until October called First Accounts, which is presented on Wednesdays. A Jewish Holocaust survivor, ... , told the story of her life in Belgium, her efforts with the underground resistance, and her experience in Auschwitz and a later death march. That she survived was incredible. That she was reunited with her husband and daughter after the war is miraculous. To hear her, you knew that she had told that story many, many times. But you also knew that it was important for her to tell her story over and over—she wouldn’t leave out any detail. It seemed that telling her story validated it, and validated the fact that she was human and had been victimized, and that the victimization was terribly wrong. So many times she explained that the persecution and brutalization of the Jews in Europe was a result of systematic dehumanization on the part of the controlling political powers. The details of her life and those she knew seemed to reinforce for her that each of their lives have value, preventing her from succumbing to the ideology that facilitated the systematic elimination of an entire race. It seemed like telling her story helped her stave off a depression that resulted in a true feeling of worthlessness, because who could do this to another human being?

We walked around the museum after the presentation, and it was moving and terrible. To see the persecution, the ghettos, the cattle cars, the work camps, the gas chambers. The most moving part for me was the children’s art work towards the end. There were pictures that children had made while in the ghettos of their pre-war memories and their current experiences. I was ashamed that the US turned a blind eye for so long, that other countries did, too. That anyone could now deny that these atrocities occurred is unconscionable.

At the end is the eternal flame, dedicated to all those who sacrificed something in the Holocaust. On one of the walls above it was inscribed Deuteronomy 30:19:" I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and acursing: therefore bchoose life, that both thou and thy seed may live..."