Web Magazine Online

Previous | Web Magazine | Next

By Pamela sf Kong Humanizing History for Me: My Visit to the Museum of Tolerance As children, we learn of the Holocaust. We see pictures of bone thin men and women, with melancholy faces lining up for soup, for a shower, or working in concentration camps. No one is smiling. We are given images of barbed wire, uncomfortable barracks and gas chambers. We ask ourselves many history classes later, "Could this have been real? Could such an event really have occurred?" The Yellow Star of David, Nazi Swastika, and a number tattooed on a nameless, faceless arm is placed before us as we ask ourselves, " How could people be so cruel? Why didn't anyone resist? How did entire nations fall under the sway of the Nazi flag?" I walk into the Museum of Tolerance, armed with the knowledge I have gained through these years as a PC student in PC schools. I have heard so much about the Holocaust that I have become desensitized. To me, it is History. It is merely an event of the past from which nations today can learn and progress. I enter the Holocaust exhibit and am greeted by images of Pre-Nazi Berlin. I witness the rise of Hitler, fall of Jews. There are women and men, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and soldiers lost in the terror of Nazi rule. I listen to the voice recordings that accompany each scene of the exhibit. I hear the fears and worries of Jews and Germans. I listen to pain, loss, suffering, and hate. I see the hair clothes and eyes of people in Berlin, in Warsaw, and in Auschwitz. I visit their homes, cafes, hiding places, meeting rooms and concentrations camps. The bald heads and skeleton flesh come back to me. I am in Nazi Germany. I am a Jew and people around me are losing their homes, their stores, their loved ones, and their lives. The Holocaust exhibit forces the viewer to become a part of the story it tells. It is not possible to walk from scene to scene and to listen to human voices without participating. Whatever you've learned, whatever you've heard about Nazis and Jews, put it away -- or take it with you, because this exhibit, to say the least, is an experience that enlightens and compels. I truly feel that this tour of the Holocaust humanized history for me. Although I have always known that what happened to the Jews could have happened to anyone, being completely immersed in the architecture, fashion, and social attitudes of the time cemented this belief. For me, the loss and mutilation of human lives during the Holocaust had moved beyond the pages of a book and beyond the label of Jews and Germans into the broader scope of humankind. This of course is not to in anyway invalidate the Holocaust as a unique aspect of the Jewish experience, only to say that no one is safe from the type of degradation and acts of hate Jews had to endure. A visit to the Tolerance Center's hate group locator wall brought to the present the hate and violence to which Jews were subjected. It greatly disturbed me that in the U.S. there are over 250 hate groups. What is perhaps more unsettling is the fact that many of these groups are based in coastal cities which supposedly have the most contact with people from other countries as well as having high immigrant populations. I am forced to think how easily the Nazi Regime gained power and support. I wonder if it is possible for a type of Holocaust to occur in the United States today. Indeed, the Japanese were incarcerated in WWII, and with the increasing number of hate groups, there is little to say that America has grown wiser. The Museum of Tolerance has reminded me that hate is not the work of a nation but of people searching for answers and wanting scapegoats. Hate violence is the physical consequence of a mentality which seeks to assert moral goodness of the self through degrading and dehumanizing the "other." It is people who kill and mutilate, not Swastikas. There aren't any simple answers to decreasing the number of hate groups in the U.S. or to reducing hate crimes. One would think that after the loss of twelve million human lives, the world would learn. People should know better. Perhaps hate is an inherent human condition. I don't know. My hope is that it is a lack of knowledge which perpetuates this cycle of hate, because at least then we have hope of altering the mindset of anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. At least then, we have a chance of moving beyond just tolerance and reaching understanding. (Pamela sf Kong is a Senior majoring in Asian American Studies.)