Some of the thousands of shoes confiscated from arriving prisoners
at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution. On November 1, 1978, President Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel. Two years later the United States Congress voted unanimously to establish the museum, and the federal government provided land adjacent to the Washington Monument for construction.
In October 1988, President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of the building, and on April 22, 1993 the museum was dedicated amid speeches by American President Bill Clinton, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, Elie Wiesel and others of note. Four days later the Museum opened to the general public. Its first visitor was the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
Admission is free, but to tour the permanent exhibit you need a ticket which you can get ahead of time online. You can also get tickets on the day of your visit, but just be warned, there'll be a line.
Five years ago, when the girls and I visited Washington on our History Vacation, I started the tour of the permanent exhibit, but like this year's tour of the Museum of African American History and Culture, it was too intense and I had to leave the tour.
What the tour does is exactly what it is meant to do. It brings home to your heart that the Holocaust was not only a horror committed against millions of Jews and other Europeans, but murder and unspeakable cruelty against individual people. Some, seniors like me. Some, children like my grandchildren. Some, well-educated professionals. Some, working class. Each a person had their own past, their own hope for the future, their own story. Each person had a name.
During my abortive visit five years ago, I waited in the reception area for the girls to finish the tour. I met a woman also waiting. She was a little older than I. An immigrant with an accent. She was a Holocaust Survivor. She was very young when her family was sent to one of those camps. And she was the only one of her family who lived. We didn't talk very much about what happened to her in the camp. We talked about how she came to the United States. How she met her husband. About her children and grandchildren. For me, she is living proof that humanity can endure and rise above hate and tyranny.
The museum and that woman's experiences remind me that we cannot be bystanders. Germany during that time was not a nation of monsters. I'm sure they never believed their country could perpetrate such evil. It can happen here. It has happened here. Perhaps not so efficiently or on such an industrial scale, but wars, both formal and informal, against Native Americans. Communities' tacit acceptance of lynchings of African Americans. Cultural abuses great and small against immigrants, minority religious groups, the physically or developmentally handicapped, people who somehow deviate from the "norm."
To protect against becoming a Nazi-Germany-style nation, it is absolutely necessary that we speak out against hate and prejudice whether we're in line at the checkout counter in Walmart or in the voting booth.
My son John and his wife decided before the D.C. trip that nine-year-old Silas was too young to go through the Holocaust Museum so he and I did our own thing while John and J.R. went to the museum. The plan was to meet up after lunch at the Museum of American History.
If you recall, Silas's priorities for the vacation were to swim in the hotel pool and go to an escape room. First of all, being locked in a room anywhere is not my idea of entertainment. For that matter, neither is swimming in a hotel swimming pool. I didn't even take a swimsuit.
Luckily for both of us, the hotel had a lifeguard on duty, so I didn't have to get into the water. While Silas swam, I read. Paragraphs liberally sprinkled with "Grandma Claudia, watch this!" A good book spiced with a child's enthusiasm -- the best kind of reading.
Washington, D.C. is a wonderful town to eat in. You can partake of any cuisine from any place in the world.
To celebrate this abundance of choice, we had pizza from a food truck.
We ordered. Pepperoni, of course. Watched them make it. And ate on the terrace of the Museum of American History.
Our only food truck meal while in D.C. It was really good.
While we ate we talked about the flag we were going to see inside the National Museum of American History. The flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry." His words would become the "Star Spangled Banner."
The museum houses artifacts from all aspects of American History. Many of the exhibits follow American culture more than American history.
Americans, it seems, have always been on the move so transportation from human powered and horse drawn to steam driven engines, internal combustion engines, and electric powered machines. They have water craft of all stripes from canoes used on fresh water streams to ships for the high seas. There are locomotives and bicycles, motorcycles, and automobiles.
(To be honest, I like the Forney Museum in Denver better when it comes to bicycles, automobiles, motorcycles, and locomotives. Of course, the museum in Denver is solely focused on those items with a few manikins dressed in clothing from whatever period a vehicle is from.)
The exhibit following changes in American foods, food is preparation, preservation, and marketing over the years is fascinating.
Americans, no doubt because we are a country of immigrants, have brought our ethnic foods from all the nations of the world.
The Hello Kitty bento box is an excellent example of our adoption of things Japanese. After all, what American college student has not existed nearly exclusively on ramen noodles after growing through their childhoods admiring Ninja turtles. Okay, so the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a peculiar American take on Japanese folktales.
Pizza and pasta from Italy. Brats from Germany. General Tso's Chicken from China. Tacos from Mexico.
Speaking of tacos from Mexico. What would a good Mexican meal be without a margarita?
Yep, this is the World's First Frozen Margarita Machine.
Make mine with salt on the rim, please. Thank you.
Many of the exhibits tend toward light-heartedness and nostalgia. Like Micky Mouse and the First Ladies' evening gowns.
But some are quite serious like the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the dispersion of immigrants throughout America. Reminders that history continues to be relevant to and revelatory of history as it goes forward from today.
The
pièce de résistance:
The Star Spangled Banner
On September 13, 1814, the British Fleet attacked Ft. McHenry. The bombardment continued through that day and all through the night. On the morning of September 14, the oversized American flag was raised over the fort for reveille, just as it had been every morning for a year. The American forces had held. The British attempted land and sea invasion at Baltimore was defeated.
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
It is our responsibility to continue the fight for "the land of the free." No longer against the British, but as Walt Kelly's comic strip character Pogo said it so well, "We have met the enemy and he is us.”
