Stark Silence Tells Story Of Holocaust

There is a stillness that permeates the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an eery feeling of calm that allows no escape from questions echoing in your head.

How could this have happened? Why did no one stop it? Could it ever, God forbid, happen again?

Thoughtful, stunning, horrifying, yet surprisingly hopeful, moving through this exhibition in Washington, D.C., is a tremendously emotional journey. I wish I’d had more time to spend there, during a recent trip to the nation’s capital. On Christmas Eve day, already a time of pensiveness and soul-searching, my older brother and I spent four hours there, side by side, in silence.

The progressive exhibition begins on the fourth floor, where visitors take in the sights and sounds of the Nazi assault (1933-1939), then moves downward to the horrific Final Solution (1940-1945) housed on the museum’s third floor. On the second floor is the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance, which includes an eternal flame that serves as the United State’s national memorial to Holocaust victims. There, visitors can light a candle in the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. And on the first floor is a special exhibition which tells the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of a young boy in Nazi Germany.

Taken as a whole, the tyranny, the overwhelming evilness of the actions documented at the museum left me feeling hollow and shellshocked. But it was the humble human details of lives turned inside out that moved me to tears.

There was the pile of shoes, hundreds upon hundreds of leather shoes, heaped on either side of a walkway that led to a portrait gallery, where haunting family photographs graced the walls. There were the stomach-turning photos, mural-sized and pieced together, close-up shots of human hair shorn, then sold as mattress stuffing. There were the stacks and stacks of personal effects, toothbrushes, nail scissors, shaving kits and combs, meaningless yet achingly personal items that signified pride and care in appearance and a profound ignorance of what was to come at Nazi death camps.

All the way through the exhibition, my mind returned to a statement President Clinton made before the museum opened in 1993. It is etched into the gray marble wall at the museum’s entryway: “This museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed … a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality.”

It is a great responsibility to act as good stewards of a nation, and of the principals of democracy. In the nation’s capital, it is next to impossible to forget what that means, or to remain unmoved by the majesty of monuments that symbolize freedoms far too many of us think about far too infrequently.

But it is frighteningly easy to forget this responsibility as we move through our daily lives, ever more insular and self-concerned, too tired and too overtaxed to fight for ourselves, much less the rights of others.

We left the museum and drove away, away from the horrors of the Holocaust, away from a pale homeless woman, who, at an intersection, pressed her face against my brother’s car window to beg for money, away from the city noted both for its beauty and history, and its high crime rate.

We drove away in silence, in awe of a people who, despite unfathomable oppression and nightmarish annihilation, retained their hope and sense of solidarity through an unimaginable hell.

, DataTimes MEMO: Kathleen Gilligan is Lifestyle & Trends Editor of the Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5481 or kathleeng@spokesman.com

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