Seaholm student's visit the to Holocaust Memorial Center

4th hour Blended WWII Rachel visited the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. She documented her experience.

This weekend, I went to visit the Holocaust Museum in Farmington Hills. As someone with an interest in the causes and atrocities of the Holocaust, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the museum. I am well versed in the facts and have heard many personal stories from survivors. Honestly, I did not really believe that the museum would have much information to offer me that I wasn’t already aware of. But from the moment I set foot in the door, I was completely proven wrong.

When you enter the museum, there is a large display about the history of the Jewish people. This was so interesting to add to the museum because it allows visitors to notice the recurring pattern of persecution of members of the Jewish faith. This laid a strong foundation for the exhibit about the causes of the holocaust, and the “scapegoating” of the Jews that occurred by Hitler and the Nazis. Although most people know that Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s problems, it was so powerful to see that the Jewish people have constantly been held accountable throughout history for problems that they could not possibly be culpable for.

The next part of the museum was an exhibit about the lives of the Jews before the holocaust. Seeing pictures of their communities and families made it so much more heartbreaking that they were subjected to such cruelty. People living and working, contributing to communities, and going about their every day business brought the history lesson to life. As much as I enjoyed the first few exhibits at the Holocaust Museum, by far the most powerful for me was the display about the horrible conditions and deaths that took place in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The videos and images that the museum curators had chosen highlighted both the intolerable cruelty of the Nazis and the indifference of the rest of the world to stop the mass genocide. News articles were laid out side by side about gas chambers and about the United Nation’s decision not to intervene. For the Jews being gassed, starved, and tortured to death, this indecision by major world powers was fatal.

The sheer horror of the Holocaust, however, really hit me personally when I was standing alone in the railroad car that they have at the museum. This car was extremely small, but up to 70 people would be crammed into it when they were taken from their homes and brought to concentration camps. They were often held in the cars for days or weeks, frequently contracting terrible illnesses or starving to death. As I stood in the car, I began to wonder how many people had been torn from their lives and their families and ended up standing in the same place on its floor that I was.

 As a Jew, I come from a family that was greatly affected by the Holocaust. The Geutman and Neustampel families, or my great grandmother’s parents’ families, were all killed in the concentration camps. Of her siblings, by great grandmother was the only one to escape to America with her husband before World War II. Standing in that boxcar, I couldn’t help feeling ridiculously lucky. I am one of the only descendants of two families that were huge and full of life. If my great grandmother had not decided to emigrate, the overwhelming likelihood is that I would not be alive today. Although I was born decades later in another country, I still felt the loss in that moment of a family that I was never able to know. Adolph Hitler was a horrible man. This is common knowledge. Adolph Hitler was an incredibly abusive dictator who murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million innocents. This is also common knowledge. But what I did not see until I was standing in that museum is that Hitler took away so much potential. Those murdered people could have been husbands and wives, doctors or lawyers, poets or soldiers. If they had been allowed to grow and flourish, the world might have been a very different place because of their contributions. It is easy to look at numbers and to read stories, but until you stand in the shoes of someone en route to their death, it is impossible to truly comprehend the loss of humanity that occurred due to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Museum opened my eyes to the responsibility that I share with the other members of my generation- the responsibility to preserve the legacy of those who were silenced by hatred and prejudice, and to ensure that it the world becomes a place where these injustices will never be permitted again.