Somewhere back there my Dad and I had agreed to see the Holocaust Museum together when we were both in DC. This was one of those "seeing it in the paper and agreeing to see it" kind of things. I figured this was the closest I'd ever get to seeing it with him, so I went there first on my first tourist walk. When I got there we were cuing up to get entry tickets. Some had been there quite a while, but the plaza behind me filled up quickly.

  

To make a long story short, my entry time was only an hour in the future. Conveniently, in the auditorium downstairs there was a talk about American GIs and the Holocaust would start in five minutes and last most of the time till then. I got a seat just before this woman took the stage and started talking.

She explained that most GIs avoided the concentration camps. However, during the battle of the bulge a group of Americans had been surrounded by the Germans and surrendered. The Germans figured out that the "H" on their dog tags meant Jewish, so they culled all the Jewish soldiers and sent them off to Buchenwald (or something like that). Some of those in fact did get worked to death. However, the camp was liberated soon enough that many were saved. She told several stories about herself personally talking to a couple of those survivors. She asked us to look at the diorama that talked about that aspect of it in the exhibits afterwards.

After the talk I saw a few people go up to her that told her they were related to one of those GIs. She had the names of all of them and already knew something about that person but got right into looking for more with questions. I wandered off. Time to see this famous museum.

The exhibit was depressing and interesting. The early part explained how the discrimination against Jews and other minorities ramped up under the Nazis. It was more extreme every year. Finally it got to carting them off or killing them. The possessions of the disappeared would be auctioned off on street corners. There would be more food for everybody else. Most Germans just let it happen. The Nazis counted on that. They were only a tiny minority and they would have gotten nowhere without their public offices. There was plenty of detail about the horrible death tolls and how they happened. Then there were a set of plaques looking back on a country by country basis. Below are the best of those.

The rest were much worse.

The message of the place struck me. "Places where other people saw the Jews as part of "us", they stood up to the Nazis and the survival rate was better. This was true even on much smaller scales. Think about Anne Frank. She only needed one hiding hole, and one family friend was close to being enough. Yup. There was something of hers, a brief bio, and a sample of her hand writing in the museum to. So many stories. By the time I walked out into the bright humid afternoon sun they were closing and my head was spinning.

If you're in DC with a few hours and you need a reality check on this whole civilization thing, see this place.