Taylor Eling: Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum
One of the things I love most about Washington, D.C. is the fact that there are so many museums here and some of them are completely free to visit. The museums are all amazing; you could spend all day in just a single one, or visit multiple back-to-back.
Recently I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Entrance is free, but you do have to get a time ticket for the permanent exhibit - you can pick these up in the museum, and it’s just meant to limit the number of people going through the exhibit at a given time, since it wasn’t designed to hold huge crowds. There are also temporary exhibits like “Americans and the Holocaust” which examines how the American people and government reacted to the Holocaust as it was happening.
Nearly everything about the museum is designed to have some effect on your experience; I spoke to a docent briefly and she told me that the architect designed the building to create a feeling of being in that time period. There’s lots of brick and iron to simulate the industrial nature of Germany at the time, and the interior of the museum is dark and somewhat cramped- especially on a crowded day, to give us a vague impression of what the victims had to go through. You start on the top floor and work your way down through the years leading up to and during the Holocaust, so you get a picture of how it began and how the world allowed it to happen. It’s so well done, and the information it presents is so important to our understanding of that horrific time period. I’d say that everyone should visit the Holocaust Museum at least once. I hadn’t been since I was maybe 10, so it was a good experience to visit again now that I’m older and can understand the gravity and significance of genocide, and how people could do such things to one another.
The picture below is of one of the glass walkways, and across the entire walkway are town names all over Europe whose Jewish populations were mostly or completely wiped out during the Holocaust.