the holocaust museum and majdanek.
Get up. Pack. Always the worst part of any vacation: the packing to go home. If we ever get divorced, Reason Number One: he made me pack.
Walk to the Holocaust Museum. Get in the Members line with Nevin's father's membership card. (Yes, Nevin, I'll get it in the mail post-haste.) Go through Museum at top speed. Most of the Naval Academy at Annapolis is in the Museum as well. Find this slightly strange. Continue.
Return to hotel. Have lunch. Grab bags. Get on airport transport. Get dropped off at Airport Terminal located a few blocks away. Check in for flight here, get bags stamped, get on new bus. Go to Dulles International. Get on plane.
Fly for 5 hours. Be unable to sleep. Try to turn on computer, fail.
Go home. Discover pile of mail and several birthday presents but not very many phone messages. (Phew.) Get mail. Eat spaghetti dinner. Watch American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, laugh uproariously, appreciate Ryan Stiles' talent. Ignore South Park.
Go to sleep in own bed.
The Holocaust Museum is a must-see. What can I tell you? It's pretty damn thorough, going through the history not only of the rise of Naziism but of antisemitism in general, beginning way back with those wacky early Christians and continuing right through the Church, Luther's Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
There wasn't too much there Darin and I hadn't heard before, but I think it's safe to say we were the only ones there who could make that claim: I kept hearing soft exclamations of surprise or disbelief from fellow visitors.
The best part of the Museum, the part you should definitely save enough time for, is the film of Holocaust survivors recounting their stories. Little stories. Just enough to tell you how fucked up their world became during this time. It's pretty hard to listen to, but it's well worth it, for one fact alone--they survived. People can go through events like this and survive and live to tell about them.
I personally didn't find a few of the exhibits as interesting as I might, because I've been to the Majdanek camp in Poland, which was (at least 10 years ago) preserved just as it was when it was in operation. I didn't see Auschwitz while I was there, and my friend whom I was visiting said that Auschwitz was not nearly as overwhelming as Majdanek, because before it was a camp Auschwitz was an army camp (I think) and so was just row upon row of neat brick buildings.
Majdanek, with its giant wooden barracks, was one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life. One barracks contained nothing but shoes, which was much more affecting (for me) than the exhibit of shoes in the Holocaust Museum, because you're standing in the place where the people who owned some of these shoes were herded in like cattle, next to the giant wooden bunks where they slept together. Someone walked into the barracks behind me and Ariane and the two of us jumped about 15 feet in the air--it was that scary.
I remember looking at the structure of the camp and thinking, Who the hell thought this up? Because the gas chambers were here, and the crematorium was there, and the prisoners had to pull carts laden with bodies from here to there... And the crematorium was so small--I stood by these tiny ovens and thought, This is crazy.
What was crazier was that off the crematorium was a small bathroom, where the Commandant would take his bath, heated by the ovens.
The central display at Majdanek is a giant funnel that contains the remains found in the ovens when the camp was liberated. A giant funnel of ash. Even now I can't comprehend it.
(And don't fucking write me and tell me that it doesn't make any sense because it didn't happen. I have no patience with idiots, especially ones who want to whitewash over this horrible--but unfortunately credible--event.)
I visited the site of another camp when I was there too--Treblinka? But the camp had been razed, and all that was there were artistic representations of the camp, and gravestones for the dead.
In Warsaw there is one memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto itself was destroyed. I wonder if there's much more there now that Poland has opened up.
|
|
|
|
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com