"Holocaust Museum" from Steve

Steve had wanted to visit the National Holocaust Museum for as long as I could remember. I'd been only once before, with my mother and younger brother. Both are people who understand that I have a tendency to take things in straight to my heart with hurt so deep and hard that I frequently can't function for long periods of time afterwards. True to my own history, I couldn't speak for three days after we left.

I was terrified to walk back into that building with my husband. He was the only person who could convince me to even think of facing that horror again. The man who I felt safest with in the world, grabbed my hand and promised not to let go. And he never did. 

Eventually, he wrote the following. He did it to show he hurt, too. To show there exists things that change the way we view our world forever. It's one of the traits I loved most about him.

When we left the Holocaust Museum, we headed straight through the gardens to the art museum. Where we quietly sat on benches staring at some of my favorite artist, holding hands, saying nothing. We both hurt. Together. And we healed together, as well.

September 1, 2009

The saddest place I’ve ever been was the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Even after visiting ground zero of September 11, nothing has ever affected me more profoundly than the Murrah building, and this is for two reasons. First, the fence around the building was covered with children’s toys, the toys that belonged to Tim McVeigh’s victims. It was a stunning visual reminder of the horrific reality of McVeigh’s crime. Second, the people of Oklahoma City were not prepared for this violence. When I was growing up in New York, we were shown maps of Manhattan with concentric circles expanding from the Empire State Building. The circles represented the blast zone of a thermonuclear weapon and the Empire State Building was always labeled “Ground Zero” because this was where the Soviets would drop the bomb. I lived in the third circle, named “three to five miles”. New Yorkers have always prepared for ground zero; the good people of Oklahoma City had not. They thought they were safe, and that their kids were safe. That still breaks my heart.

I expected my visit to the National Holocaust Museum to challenge my experience in OKC , but it didn’t. The museum is profoundly sad, yet still manages to celebrate the lives and the spirits of those who perished during the Holocaust. Today we throw the numbers around like snowballs: 6 million Jews, 5 million non Jews. The numbers are so large that they defy any tangible meaning. But go to the museum and look at the photographs. See the faces. Read the stories. You’ll see that somehow those numbers begin to take on meaning, a horrible horrible meaning.

To those who think it is appropriate to carry posters of President Obama with a Hitler mustache to a Health Care Town Hall meeting, I challenge you to visit this museum to see who the Nazis really were. To those who think it appropriate to refer to the conservative right and their bloviated pitchmen as Nazis, I challenge you to visit the museum. “Feminazi”, “Soup Nazi”. We trivialize the memory of those who gave their lives as victims of, or as soldiers ensuring the defeat of Adolf Hitler and his tyranny when we use the term Nazi so loosely. One take away from my visit was this: The closest thing to Nazism in our culture is those who shout “Look, that one is a Nazi”. It is a disgrace I am guilty of, and I will never make that mistake again.

When I was 17 I believed in George Orwell’s philosophy that all war was wrong. My dad was a soldier in World War II, and although I loved my father I did not respect his decision to be a soldier. I believed he was fighting for a governmental ideology, sold to an ignorant mass as patriotism. I thought he was a pawn. About that time, PBS first showed the films of the liberation of the concentration camps. If you’ve never seen them then nothing I could write will ever prepare you for them. We watched it together, me and my dad, and when they were done through my tears I said to him “I am sooooo proud of you”. That’s what my dad did when he was 22 years old.

I kept thinking of that moment at the Holocaust museum. I’m still so very proud.