United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

We'd been to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) about 20 years ago and it made a huge impression on me - I hesitated coming back but took a deep breath and made the reservation.

The USHMM is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust and provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history.  It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

Since its dedication in 1993, the museum has had nearly 40 million visitors, including more than 10 million school children, 99 heads of state, and more than 3,500 foreign officials from over 211 countries and territories.  The museum's visitors have come from all over the world, and less than 10 percent are Jewish.  In 2008, the website had 25 million visits, from an average of 100 countries, daily.  Thirty-five percent of these visits were from outside the United States.

The USHMM's collections contain more than 12,750 artifacts, 49 million pages of archival documents, 85,000 historical photographs, a list of over 200,000 registered survivors and their families, 1,000 hours of archival footage, 93,000 library items, and 9,000 oral history testimonies.  It has teacher fellows in every state in America and, since 1994, almost 400 university fellows from 26 countries.

After we entered, we got in line for the elevators to take us inside the museum.  

It was nice to see young people there so that they can learn about history.

The artifacts, photos, and information is overwhelming......and heartbreaking.

I think we all know the story of Anne Frank.  I watched the movie The Diary of Anne Frank many times as a child and laid in bed at night thinking the sirens in the distance were coming for me.  I was always so relieved when I woke up in my very own bed the next morning.

Anne Frank was one of the more than one million Jewish children in Europe who died in the Holocaust. Born in Germany in 1929, she fled to Amsterdam with her family soon after Adolf Hitler came to power.

In May 1940, German troops invaded the Netherlands.  The following year, Anne was forced to leave her school to attend a Jewish one.  Soon thereafter, the Frank family began making preparations to go into hiding.  In May 1942, Anne, along with other Jews in the Netherlands, was required to wear a yellow Star of David.

That summer, the deportations of Dutch Jews to German-occupied Poland began.  On July 5, Anne's' sister Margot received a summons to report for "labor".  The following day, the Frank family went into hiding.  For more than two years, they lived with four friends in a secret annex behind her father's company warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.  German and Dutch security police, using information provided by an informer, raided the building and arrested the inhabitants on August 4, 1944.

The Franks were sent to the Westerbork transit camp and from there deported to Auschwitz on September 3.  Less than two months later, Anne and Margot were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Anne's mother, Edith, perished at Auschwitz in January, 1945.  In March, Anne and Margot died from typhus at Bergen-Belsen, just weeks before the British army liberated the camp.  Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Anne's father, Otto, survived.

Anne Frank, 1929-1945

The "Anne Frank" house, Amsterdam

The inscription over the main gate to Auschwitz, "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work will make you free"), was a cynical falsehood, suggesting that the purpose of concentration camps was to reform inmates, who could earn their freedom through work.  In reality, the aim of the camps was to extract the maximum amount of work from the prisoners, whatever the cost to health or life, and to kill all Jewish inmates through overwork, starvation, and gas.

This arch is a casting made from the entrance gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Approximately half of the Birkenau camp is visible in this photograph, taken after the liberation from the watchtower over the camp's main entrance.  At the lower right is the railway platform where incoming Jewish prisoners were selected for slave labor or for immediate gassing.  

February, 1945

The Nazis and their collaborators sought to deceive Jews and others who were deported to concentration camps and killing centers.  They portrayed the deportations as "resettlements" and permitted people to bring a few belongings to set up home in a new place.  Upon their arrival at the camps, Jews and other victims were stripped of all their personal items.  These included clothes, shoes, hairbrushes, prosthetic limbs, eyeglasses, toys, books, and kitchen utensils.  Camp officials forced prisoners to sort through the stolen property and ship selected items to Germany to benefit the economy.

Prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau unload and sort Jewish victims' belongings

The "Final Solution" involved wholesale theft as well as mass killing, and it generated thousands of freight carloads of stolen goods.  Before Jews were gassed, the SS confiscated all of their belongings.  Money and other valuables were sent to the Reichsbank, Germany's central bank.

Among the mountains of clothing and footwear that accumulated, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek yielded hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes, the best of which were distributed to German settlers in Poland.

Shoes found at the Majdanek camp in Lublin, Poland, at its liberation by Soviet troops in July 1944

I remember when we were here before there was a display of thousands of hair brushes that had been confiscated from the prisoners.  It really left an impression on me.  But, apparently, the exhibit has been temporarily removed - I think I'm glad I didn't see it again.

These cobblestones originally paved a section of Chlodna Street that was located inside the Warsaw ghetto from November 1940 to December 1941.  Another section of the same street was off limits to Jews, who had to cross over it on a wooden footbridge.

This photograph shows the footbridge over Zgierska Street in Koscielny

A path connecting the Treblinka killing center with a nearby forced-labor camp was paved with the crushed remains of tombstones from Jewish cemeteries.  Below is a casting from a section of the path; Hebrew letters are visible on several pieces.

After arriving at the camp by train, those selected for immediate death were marched to the underground entrance of the gas chamber.

SS photograph of Jewish women and children on the road to the gas chambers, Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944

When the victims had taken off all their clothes, they were herded into the underground gas chamber, disguised with fake showerheads as a shower room.  As soon as the chamber was filled with people, sealed, and locked, SS guards poured Zyklon B pellets in through special vents in the roof, and the deadly gas was released.  Most of the victims died within a few minutes.  After about 20 minutes, when all were dead, ventilators expelled the poisonous air.

Gas chamber door

As Allied and Soviet armies advanced on Nazi Germany during the winter of 1944-1945, the SS began to evacuate concentration camps near the front and to remove the prisoners to camps inside Germany.  The Nazi regime wanted to erase the evidence of its atrocities and to continue exploiting inmate labor.

At first, prisoners were transferred by train, and even by boat.  Evacuations by foot, which became known as death marches, began in the final stages of Germany's military collapse.  Prisoners were forced to march, often hundreds of miles and in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest.  Any prisoner unable to keep up with the others was shot.

The first major death march was launched in July 1944, when more than 4,000 inmates of a camp set up on the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto were moved to Kutno, a distance of 81 miles.  About one-fourth of them were killed on the way.  The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army was liberating Poland.  On January 18, 1945, about 60,000 prisoners were removed from Auschwitz; 15,000 died during the march.

Mass killings of prisoners often occurred before, during, or after marches.  In one evacuation, 6,000 prisoners from several satellite camps in East Prussia were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, where they were shot.

General Dwight Eisenhower and other high-ranking U.S. Army officers viewing the bodies of prisoners while on a tour of the newly liberated Ohrduf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald, April 12, 1945.

The Nuremberg trials always catch my attention as my dad spent a day or two there as a reporter/observer.  On April 26, 1946, he wrote to his parents about his experience.

"Yesterday we went to the War Crimes Trials at Dachau.  We went up there (only about 12 miles) yesterday morning and stayed till 4 in the afternoon, and I must say it was the most interesting day I’ve ever spent in Europe.  The trials concerned the Camp Mauthausen Concentration Center (Austria) and some 61 men are on trial for their lives.  The tribunal consists of eight full colonels and one major general…quite a bit of brass for the ill-deserving Krauts.  I was extremely surprised at the defense the US is giving them – they have a major and several captains representing their case, and although they put little heart in the cause, I think they should be praised for making American justice work.  Prosecuting attorney for the US is a crafty, witty Lt Col Denson, who is working the case in his own manner.  Naturally the entire proceedings must be spoken in German and English, with an expert interpreter translating every German statement to English and vice versa.  Nevertheless, the trial moves on at a fairly speedy rate."

There were a few uplifting items - thank goodness because I don't think I could have taken much more.

If you've seen the movie Schindler's List (and if you haven't you should), you know the story of  Oskar Schindler.  The movie always brings me such hope that during that horrible time, there was actually a great human being who did everything he could to help people.  When the "Schindler Jews" are at his grave at the end of the movie, I sob every time.  

Another uplifting moment was listening to the account of Gerda Weismann Klein.  In 1939, Gerda's brother was deported for forced labor.  In June 1942, Gerda's family was deported from the Bielsko ghetto.  While her parents were transported to Auschwitz, Gerda was sent to the Gross-Rosen camp system, where for the remainder of the war she performed forced labor in textile factories.  Gerda was liberated after a death march wearing the ski boots her father insisted would help her to survive.

In May 1945, she was liberated by forces of the United States Army in Volary, Czechoslovakia; these forces included Kurt Klein, who was born in Germany.  A teenage Klein immigrated to the United States in 1937 to escape Nazism.  Klein's parents were murdered at Auschwitz.  When Kurt Klein first encountered Gerda, who was one day short of her 21st birthday, she was white-haired, weighed 68 pounds, and dressed in rags.  When she hesitantly informed Klein that she was a Jew, he emotionally revealed that he was Jewish, as well.  After a courtship of several months, Gerda and Kurt were engaged in September, 1945.  Diplomatic and immigration restrictions delayed their wedding for a year, but Kurt finally returned to Europe from the U.S. in 1946 and they were married in Paris.

What an emotionally exhausting day.