I believe I spoke fewer words on Sept. 22 than on any other day I can possibly remember.
I attended a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for Wisconsin teachers set up by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
Amazingly, the trip is only a one-day endeavor in which we fly a privately-chartered jet from Milwaukee to Virginia. In Virginia, we were then picked up by a private bus company and taken to the museum in Washington, D.C.
I say “a day without words” because touring the museum provoked gasps and chokes but no verbally distinguishable utterances or adjectives. I have never been to a museum that affected me so viscerally as this museum.
I am still left to reconcile merely with images: the 15,000 pounds of hair shorn from victims at Auschwitz and the countless brown-worn leather shoes; the video footage of concentration camps and death centers, where bodies were disposed of like refuse in a landfill; the haunting and disorienting cobblestones taken directly from the Warsaw ghetto; the rusty, pale green cans of Zyklon B.
The rail car that now seems harmless but was once filled with desperate cries and diabolical screams; the wall of rescuers 10 feet high and 50 feet long, filled on two sides top to bottom with names of heroes; the Danish fishing boat that carried Danish Jews to refuge in Sweden — reminding us that Denmark reclaimed all but 51 of its almost liquidated Jews.
As I walked through the museum, shades of grey and ashen black evanesced into an illuminated hexagonal-like rotunda of smooth white stone. The sun shone directly through into the center of the rotunda, where an eternal flame sits in commemoration of millions.
I remember being awestruck in the contrast of this room with the exhibit as its anteroom. I have not felt a compulsion to pray in my life like the force I felt at the moment after entering the rotunda. But that feeling was not accompanied by any identifiable message and not associated with any particular god.
As I leave the Hall of Remembrance, two Holocaust survivors volunteer to share their stories in the open first-floor staircase.
Both have had the tattoos as evidence and have had 63 years of remembrance (61 of them as a married couple). Walking testimonies of hope and memory, they had but one simple message that resonated throughout: “Do not love me, but tolerate me because I exist.”
And then I thank the victims for their bravery and willingness to bear all to perfect strangers. We hug, shake hands and dry our eyes.
Within seconds, we are separated, never to see each other again. Within minutes, I am back in the comfort of a private jet eating asparagus and turkey, drinking dark, sugary coffee.
Within hours, I am home and in bed, in 2008, grappling in the dark with a blurry and horrifying collage of images I will never forget and likely never fully understand.
Corey Jeffers teaches seventh-grade English and Language Arts at John Muir Middle School in Wausau. He visited the museum as part of the Wisconsin Educators’ U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Trip & Holocaust Education Seminar, which is sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations and the Coalition for Jewish Learning’s Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center. This article first appeared on the blog, Mr. J’s Rumination Station, http://mrcoreyjeffers.blogspot.com.
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