Yad Vashem (Sunday, July 3) – Holy Land Adventure

Yad Vashem is Israel’s official museum and memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I really wanted to go, but I really didn’t want to go–if you know what I mean. I knew it was going to be a hard visit, even with no family or religious connection to the Holocaust. As much as I love WWII history, I struggle with reading/listening/researching about the Holocaust. It’s just too horrible. And thinking about other genocides–not as recent or well-documented, but just as horrific–is a little too much for me.

And yet there are people who aren’t sure or don’t believe that it happened. That is hard for me to understand–I wonder what blind spots I have, if any, that other people struggle to understand.

On our last day of exploration, we made reservations for Yad Vashem. It was an optional experience–I didn’t want to force anyone here.

Bradley, Zee, Yummy, LaDonna, and Eva (and me!) are the ones who chose to come to the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem. It is not a place to take selfies or many pictures–in fact, in the museum itself photography is prohibited. This is us walking over the bridge to the museum entrance.

We knew that Yad Vashem might be a little too much for my sensitive eleven-year-old Yummy. You have to be at least ten years old to even come to the museum, which is super wise of them. It’s such heavy history. Yummy really wanted to come, though, and I certainly wasn’t going to discourage her. She made it through the first several rooms, but once she read that the Nazis targeted physically/mentally disabled people–like her sibling Gee or her cousins Jay or Kip–well, that hit her like a ton of bricks. We quickly made our way out of the museum and into the gardens. We found her name in this sign, walked and talked a little, and then Bradley came out and found us so I could go back in.

After walking through the gardens and the Children’s Garden (not as graphic but just as stark–a voice reading the names of the children lost in the Holocaust, with pictures floating in dark mirrors with floating stars and candles. Really awesome but also super sobering.), Yummy and Daddy found a bench under the shade of the trees. Yummy journaled and was able to regain her equilibrium.

When Yummy needed to leave, we were just a little way through. Walking through the rest of it, I couldn’t read everything, or stop and listen at every place. The horrors the survivors experienced and described–what people could do to “other” people–was hard to take in. I felt so frustrated with the slow build-up–I wanted to shout to the people in the past to GET OUT; and for our government to realize sooner; and for the Germans of the 1930s to REALIZE. I may have gotten a little emotional myself.

After exiting the museum, I realized just how much the Jewish people lost in the Holocaust–the cultural memories, the family memories, the connections and the community and the security, the generations that just END–it’s no wonder the Israeli rallying cry is “Never Again”. The impact of the Holocaust is hard to overstate, and I knew that before going in, but it is stark and unavoidable at Yad Vashem.

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