A World Where God Cried

A World Where God Cried: Visiting The National Holocaust Museum

It was a beautiful Saturday in early August of 2008, during a weekend jaunt to the nation’s capital city. Then a lanky, bespectacled teenager fresh out of high school, I, my father, and two brothers stood before the imposing concrete facade of a three-story building just south of the Washington Monument. Despite the relentless summer heat, I shivered with excitement and glanced at the brochure clutched in my hands: “Welcome to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum.”

My maternal grandfather had taken part in the D-Day invasion during World War Two, and fought on through VE-day liberating Western Europe. Twenty-seven years before that, my great-grandfathers on both sides had enlisted to fight in the Great War, though only one made it overseas. Furthermore, a distant relative had served in the 151st Pennsylvania Infantry during the American Civil War. History–particularly military history–was like food and drink for my hyperactive brain. What better way to celebrate my graduation, then, than a jaunt through the national museums?

This particular museum, however, had topped the metaphorical list. As a cocksure young adult, I was certain I was prepared for it. After all, the bookcase in my bedroom was stuffed to the gills with biographies and encyclopedias covering everything from Hannibal's march on Ancient Rome to tank operations of the Gulf War. I took pride in committing data points of aircraft production and battlefield casualties to memory. I had studied Ellie Wiesel and Anne Frank in English class. I had even seen Saving Private Ryan. Twice.

I knew the horrors of war.

The entrance hall of the museum was eerily quiet, save the gentle wisps of air required for cellular respiration. Only moments before, on the building’s veranda, I had carried on a lively discussion regarding everything from the weather to the performance of the (then) Reading Phillies. Now–as if by some magical spell–I found myself as quiet and still as a terracotta soldier guarding an emperor’s tomb, wallowing in the shadows from the Spartan interior light. The brochure lay crumpled, forgotten in my hands.

Our collective attention was focused on a large, cast-iron sign mounted just beneath the ceiling, arching over our heads like an open hand poised to snatch. It was an exact duplicate of another sign in Poland, both sporting the angular letters spelling Arbeit Macht Frei: “freedom through labor.” But for those herded into the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps between 1943 and 1945, it meant the entrance to Hell on Earth.
Breathing slowly in an effort to calm my heart rate, I swallowed and entered the main hall.

On the opening floor we spotted the Tower of Faces, a narrow hallway which extended to the roof of the building. The exhibit commemorates the massacre of every Jew in the Lithuanian border town of Eishishok in September 1941. Each wall of the room was layered with photographs of the victims, donated from family collections and archives. They were exactly the same as the family pictures in my living room; children standing with their parents, and husbands smiling with their wives. I found myself shivering again–but this time it wasn't from excitement.

On the middle floor we found the exhibit titled Prisoners of the Camps. Here we saw just how far the Nazis reached in their desire for racial and cultural purity; Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even prisoners of war were slowly worked to death in back-breaking slave labor. Here the pictures showed subjects in threadbare prison garb, their faces either taut with fear or sunken with starvation and exhaustion. I lost count of how many children looked roughly my little brothers’ age. I shuddered and hurried through the opposite door; the thought of them in such a state brought my stomach into my throat.

However, the final display we viewed easily trumped them all. Across one side of the middle floor stood a pile of 4,000 shoes collected when their owners were retrieved from the gas chambers in Poland. (For shoe leather was valuable, and sending them through the furnace with their cargo was simply wasteful.) The fabric and leather was cracked and shriveled with age, but their reeking odor of death was overpowering. Neighboring photographs displayed piles of jewelry and gold teeth stacked as tall as the soldiers guarding them; a sadistic collection of trophies after the hunt.

As we shuffled silently to the exit, I recalled that my grandfather rarely spoke of his experiences during the war until the day he died. My chest tightened at my next thought: Where exactly had he been deployed in the advance across France and Germany? Had he witnessed any of these atrocities firsthand? Had I failed to recognize him in one of the photographs plastered throughout the building only minutes ago?

I remembered all the classic works of science fiction where the proletariat is demoted in status from human beings to cattle. “For what is the individual?” asks the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in the dystopian masterpiece Brave New World. "We can make a new one with the greatest ease–as many as we like.” Now I felt I had crossed dimensions and emerged in some twisted collaboration of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; a world where the state lorded over even the most minute facets of its people’s lives. A world where to be labeled a “subversive” or an “undesirable” was a death sentence. A world where God cried.

My world.

Sleep came only in fits and starts that night–if it came at all. Was I half-expecting to hear the shouted command, “Raus! Raus!” or the clatter of jackboots ascending the stairs? Did I fear the sunken, pleading eyes of emaciated children would come looming out of the shadows? Fleetingly, perhaps. But again and again, these apparitions of memory were drowned out by a slogan I had seen on the banners beside the museum’s entrance: “Never again.”

“Never again.”

I opened my laptop first thing after arriving home the next evening. I typed “recent genocides” into the search bar, and spent the next thirty minutes skimming over dozens of results. I refined the search, limiting my results to those which took place after the day of my birth in 1990. The Gaza Strip crisis. The Rwandan Genocide. The War in Darfur. I slumped in the chair and shook my head. I barely watched the news; web comics and blogs were my forte. How many of these events had passed me by? Or worse, how many had I flat-out ignored?

Glancing back at the screen, an ad at the bottom of the page caught my eye: “Amnesty International.” I hesitated briefly, then moused over and clicked.