Journal entry, Feb 28th 2011: Yad Vashem!
This was truly a hard field trip day…for the past two months we have been taking an Israeli class on Judaism up to modern Israel. One of the last field trips for this class was to visit Yad Vashem, or the Holocaust Museum. Outside of the cement museum are gardens dedicated to those who fought for the Jews or were heroic in hiding them, or saving them from the Nazis and the like. hundreds of little plaques that had names of those heroic people.
There was a room, not connected to the main museum that was called the Children’s memorial. This room was dedicated to all the children that had died. It was breathtaking. The room is VERY dark, almost pitch black, except for hundreds of little lights, acting as candles. The walls are made up of thousands of mirrors, so it has an eternal feeling about it. There is a soft voice as you walk through the room, that is naming the children, one at a time, and where they are from.
The main museum is split into twelve different sections for the different time periods and places during the Anti-Semitic period. As the museum continues towards the middle, it goes down, ever so slightly to signify the war/atrocities getting worse and then after the sixth room, the flooring starts to rise, as people start to revolt and fight back, and the Jews slowly are freed.
There were so many plaques, TV screens, displays, etc. to look at. One of the plaques that struck me was:
“First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
“Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
“Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
-*Pastor Martin Niemoller*
One of the last rooms is a dark square that has quotes being projected at random along the walls. There were many that I liked, but I only wrote a few. One being: “We survived, but we never recovered.”
I have thought a lot about how that phrase applies to the atonement, and life in general. Sure we can survive this life, with varies amounts of difficulty, but it can be done. But how can one go through this life happily without the Atonement of Jesus Christ? How does His sacrifice heal those who have been scarred by such atrocities? Does one continue to survive but remain with a scar? One of the students mentioned that there is a difference between being healed and recovering. I agree, that through Christ’s Atonement we can be healed, we can know that He knows exactly how we feel and that He will fulfill all justice. Or we can just “recover” and continue through life with a physical and spiritual scar.
There was another room, called the room of names, that was also mesmerizing. It is this HUGE room with thousands of binders with names of people who died during the Holocaust the Israelis have collected. Then there is about a 1/3 of the room with shelves that are empty, signifying those names that are not known.
This day was a more somber experience, but important to remember how we can all make a difference, no matter how small, in the lives of those around us.
Kevin Collier, Winter 2011
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