Jim told me that I must go and that I must look upon the victims and embrace them, not with sadness and horror, but with love.  He told me they need our love. 

So, Buzz and I went to the museum.  He went in interest, I went for him and for what I felt was a mission that I must perform for the victims.  You are thinking that so many of them died,  and they don’t care if I go to a small Holocaust museum, they don’t care that it was a personal challenge for me to go there and meet them.  I think they care.  I think they need our visitation and our embracing of them.  More importantly, I think we need it as well.  I think we need to be sure to remember them and to offer them honor and love.

This museum, although informative and impressive enough, didn’t detail and display many of the extreme horrors that happened during the Holocaust.  I think because a lot of school children are brought there to learn about it, and so it was constructed with it mind that they should be taught about it, but that some things were too harsh for their ages.  I know that I went braced to be confronted with things I knew were done to people that were the ultimate in indignity and suffering.  Whatever a cruel human mind can think of to inflict upon another human, Hitler and his minions thought of it and did it.

Three things in particular impressed themselves upon me while there and have remained with me since.  One was the box car that was on display.  It was one of the boxcars that had been used to transport Jewish prisoners.  This was not a large boxcar, but a hundred or more people would be crammed into it with less than standing room for them, and they would be carried many miles in suffocating heat.  They were given no water, instead were taunted with it.  They were so thirsty that they would lick the sweat from each other.  Many died standing there crammed against the others.

I laid my hand on the boxcar.  I don’t know what I expected to feel.  It seemed as though, in touching it, I could somehow touch those that had endured it.

Next was the printed information from which I read about the mass graves.  Bodies, dead or alive would be thrown into these massive pits.  It described that children would sometimes be picked up by an arm or leg by a Nazi soldier, and tossed into the graves and onto the mass of bodies. Alive.  Later, as Buzz and I were dining, a sudden and unbidden image of such a scene, of a little girl being swung out and tossed, came into my mind, and I shuddered violently.  Buzz asked me about the shudder.  I don’t remember what I answered, but I still get that image sometimes.

The third thing that stands out to me was a framed portrait on the wall of a little boy.  His eyes caught me and held me there.  He was so real to me for a moment, and I felt such attraction and sympathy for him that, without thought, in my mind I saw myself hug him and I said aloud, “Aw, honey.”

They make me cry. 

We must remember and honor them.  We must care.  We must embrace and love them.  It’s hard.  Lord, I know it’s hard!  It’s so much easier for us if we don’t look.  We have to look, not just for them, but for our own salvation.