ONE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM VISIT LATER

Museums make you feel something; in the Holocaust Museum it’s fear.

Why is the Holocaust Museum, or more correctly the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, so frightening?

Call it a learning tool.

Older visitors who’ve watched a few Holocaust movies and documentaries need a reminder that the events shown in the Holocaust Museum actually happened.

It wasn’t a blockbuster Hollywood Holocaust movie, it was a reality for millions and millions of people.

Schindler’s List was real people.

The link takes you to the list, but it might be a slow load.

Younger visitors may need an introduction to those dark days.

Once you check into the museum, you get a tour start time. It wasn’t much of a wait.

Before you start, you’re issued an Identification Card to bring the Holocaust right in your hands.

Now you have your papers, as in the check point order, “Show me your papers.”

I was now Fritz Silten. My guy, or me in the museum, was a PhD in chemistry and pharmacy, born in Berlin.

As Fritz, is there a more German name than Fritz, I got married in 1931 and had a daughter in 1933.

Getting a new identification is key to the Holocaust Museum experience. The millions of Holocaust survivors all got new identification. It’s tattooed on their inside forearm.

After the fourth floor tour, the ID papers say to turn the page.

This is when Fritz and I made our run.

The inside entrance of the museum had a death camp sorting station feel.

The elevator to the fourth floor looked like a gas chamber.

Time to bolt?

1933 – 39 in the Holocaust Museum.

On the third floor, Fritz and I moved to Amsterdam with wife and daughter. Mom came a year later. Dad stayed in Berlin.

This is all in our Holocaust Museum ID.

Maybe the train car was on the third floor, maybe the second. One thing for certain, Fritz and I weren’t getting on any death camp cattle car.

If you visit the museum with someone and they panic and run off half way through, be patient.

That’s how I explained it to my wife when I made my run. She didn’t appreciate it.

1940 – 44 in the Holocaust Museum.

Fritz and I got deported to the Westerbork transit camp.

Mom learned she was headed for Auschwitz and killed herself.

The wife, kid, Fritz, and I got re-deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto.

By now I really wanted Fritz to survive. It felt like both of us would die after watching the wife and daughter line up like Sophie’s Choice, get separated, and evaporate into the fog of history.

You can bet I was pulling for Fritz when I turned the page of our ID book at the end of the 2nd floor.

Wife, kid, two PhD’s, successful business, good citizen, with only one draw back in WWII: we were Jewish.

Come on, Fritz. Make it back, Fritz.

By then the chances of any happy endings seemed remote, especially with Russian liberators.

Holocaust Museum re-creates historical fear.

While no one enters the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum like it’s a trip to Disneyland, the echo of millions lost is deafening.

Fritz and I seemed destined for bad things.

Contrasting those feelings to current day American politics ought to be easy since history points out the fallibility of persecution as a way forward.

The same echo of the dead rings from too many podiums in too many states.

History is a teaching tool for those who apply it correctly. It’s a smoke screen for those who don’t.

Back then the world bowed to the will of a high school drop out who then continued his education by failing the admittance exam to art school.

The building in the top image is the Hitler birth house. 

It’s slated for demolition so it won’t become some kind of touch stone for future generations of inspired hate. No word on whether they’ll salt the ground, or do a fire cleanse.

So far a new building is planned with no extra treatment.

If Hitler had passed his art school exam, we may have avoided the actions he promoted later.

His words inspired dirty deeds done by those he gave inferred permission. Hitler didn’t drive the trains and order the gas for the Holocaust, but his subordinates did with powerful glee and dashing uniforms.

Today, when a grubby landlord passing himself off as a political leader makes some of the same sounds Fritz and I heard inside the Holocaust Museum, it’s time to see the truth:

Donald Trump may not believe what he says, but enough do.

Do you?

PS: Fritz, wife, and kid, were liberated from Theresienstadt. They moved back to Amsterdam after the war where he re-opened his pharmacy.

Our ID card: #5524.