Today we went to the Holocaust Memorial and Museum as part of our experience on the Freedom Tour. Though people think it wasn’t that bad they realize that it was a horrible time period. Even though I am a boy, I started crying seeing all the shoes that represented the people in the Holocaust and the saw that the doctors would use to dissemble people’s body parts and put them in liquid. Also when they would just split families apart and then murder some of them and not tell them that they were murdered--for example in Daniel’s story he and his dad got separated from his mother and sister who were soon murdered at a concentration camp.

–Chad

Out of all of the days on the Freedom Tour so far, today was probably the saddest. We visited a lot of memorials and monuments in Washington D.C. today, and it was an extremely solemn day. The Holocaust Museum is the one that really hit me the hardest and is definitely something that I will not forget.

Having Polish ancestors that escaped from their country shortly after the prosecution of the Jewish people started made me realize that if they hadn’t left, a lot of the people on my dad’s side of the family wouldn’t be here right now. I knew a lot of people died, I just didn’t realize how many. Reading all of the information about the events from beginning to end really put things in perspective for me and realized how difficult it really was for all of those people. The part of the museum that made me tear up was the shoes. The shoes of the people in the concentration camp were removed and the best ones given to the Germans. But the rest of the shoes were not. Seeing all of those shoes was just extremely sad for me. When I reached the end of the museum, I was sad. All of those people were killed because they believe in something that the Germans didn’t like or understand. This all could have been avoided. Hopefully this shows that everyone is different and we should all be appreciated for our differences.


--Kara