The weekend of March 31 to April 2 our class went to Washington D.C. to tour the Holocaust Musuem. We were required to write ten journal entries on what we witnessed and how it affected our thoughts and emotions. Here is one that I wrote a few days after we left as everything began to sink in.

Entry 10: Post-Museum Visit

Walking around the Holocaust museum all day really helped a lot of things sink in. First, it revealed the events in Germany leading up to the Holocaust that seemed to perpetuated it. I noticed the economic and social problems in Germany that affected it in a such a way that would have easily pushed any other nation to follow Hitler. When I say this I mean that when you are in despair you will most likely follow anybody who gets you out. In this case Hitler with his Third Reich showed the German people a better way to get out of their economic problems after WWI – which turned out to be the hook that persuaded countless Germans to buy into and follow his ideology. After getting the German people out of trouble he began persuading them that the cause of all their problems were the Jews. Then he began proposing how to "get rid of the cause": The Final Solution.

Second, seeing so much footage and so many photographs solidified the idea that these were actually people who were all killed for no crime at all or anything that could have justified their death. It saddens me to realize that they were executed because one group of people felt that they didn’t have any value or worth, that in fact, they were the sole cause of every problem of humanity.

Though there were some colored photographs in the museum, for the most part everything was black and white or gray. I think the Holocaust should be remembered in those in this way. Black and white because, though we try to make the issue complex, it still boils down to murder without justice. Yes, there are complex issues that need to be held into account. But People were slaughtered – for no reason! It's simple. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t remember those things that are complex in order to prevent it from reoccurring, but it should always remain appalling simply because it happened. Things were kind of gray and I just think that when you talk about senseless atrocities like this the gray shows the emptiness and lifelessness of the end result.

by Matt Quick