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I'm a Minnesota Girl, living in the south. I tell my friends I try not to talk and think like a Yankee, but sometimes I slip up!

Monday, May 25, 2009

A different kind of Memorial Day





Today my daughter and I had a different kind of memorial day -- I had been to the St. Petersburg Holocaust museum, but she had not. I did warn her, before our journey there, that no one who goes in comes out unchanged. The museum is witness to the conflagration brought on by evil in the world -- the type of evil that generates a war. There are all kinds of casualties in war beyond the brave men and women who fight it. And while the stark reminders of the evil that was Nazi Germany are hard to witness -- the yellow "Juden" stars, the damaged copy of the Torah, the sets of childrens shoes found in the camps after liberation, the unrevised or updated wood and locks of the boxcar that took the prisoners to Treblinka (above) -- hardest of all, and the most memorable reminder of what can never ever be allowed to happen again is the wall memorial of those who did not survive the Holocaust. Two stories high, 300 pictures.. truly a sad memorial on this day.





3 comments:

Bob said...

What a moving experience this must have been, especially on Mem. Day.

If you have never visited the one in D.C., you definitely should do so. It is not exactly "enjoyable" but it's terribly important. I was moved beyond words.

Kelly said...

I still have vivid memories of the pictures from the death camps that were shown to us in Junior High School. I don't think they show stuff like that to the kids anymore and I believe they should. Horrific to see, but important to understand the horrors of what took place.

In fact, I received a PPS presentation in an e-mail that included many of those photos. The e-mail urged people to share it so that the current generation would see, understand, and hopefully never repeat atrocities such as that.

Debby said...

I did not know that there was a holocaust museum in St Petersburg. It wasn't so strange a way to mark Memorial Day...you paid tribute to the war dead.

The thing that always struck me is that they were just ordinary people, like you, or like me, and suddenly fingers pointed and they were the enemy. It just seemed so random.