AUTHOR: Sheri Lynch TITLE: Remember What You Saw Here DATE: 9/18/2006 01:33:00 PM ----- BODY:

When Grandma Jacque comes to town, there’s only one rule: Mark and I have to make ourselves scarce. Our daughters and their grandma belong to a very special club, one that doesn’t admit parents. Anyone who knows me knows that I revere grandmothers. I’m the last person who’d try to argue with one. So Mark and I obliged, heading off for our annual trip alone. Or, as Olivia put it, “A weekend away without the annoyment of us.” Bright kid – understands that mommies and daddies need a break sometimes and makes up her own words. We took an E-Saver flight to Washington, D.C., found a really cheap hotel, and settled in for three and a half days of museums, galleries, weird meals, and miles of city walking. Activities unacceptable to toddlers, in other words. If you’ve never been, D.C. is a special place. Regardless of your politics, when you stand in front of the White House, or the Capitol; when you stroll through the halls of the Supreme Court; or climb the marble steps at the Lincoln Memorial, you feel such a rush of emotion. It goes beyond simple patriotism. It’s almost like pride of ownership. Yeah, this is my country. My tax dollars pay for this. And this country may be flawed and imperfect and even infuriating, but it’s ours. Nothing makes me happier than to see protesters marching, or handing out leaflets, or simply standing mute in front of hand-painted banners on the nation’s front lawn. Because there are places in this world where such things are crimes. But not here. Not even on the very steps of our government. I love that. We spent almost an entire day the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It’s a remarkable, life-affirming place. I know that must sound odd or impossible, but it’s true. The museum fills three floors, and the visitor begins at the top, which covers the rise to power of the Nazi party, in the years 1933 to 1939. The middle floor, years 1940 through 1945, represents Hitler’s “Final Solution”, and the final level is called, “The Last Chapter”. Upon entering the museum, each visitor takes an identity card, telling the story of an actual Holocaust victim. The card I chose told of a 50 year-old woman named Anna. She was a non-practicing Jew, the mother of grown children, and the wife of a merchant. She succeeded in fleeing Germany for Holland. But her freedom was short-lived. She was ultimately arrested in Amsterdam, sent to Theresiendstadt, and ultimately to Auschwitz, where she was gassed. There are artifacts and images in the museum that are difficult to take in. As numb to violence as most of us are, thanks to Hollywood, this is a kind of violence unlike anything at the movies. Some photographs and newsreel clips are so graphic, and horrifying that they are concealed behind barriers, allowing visitors to choose for themselves whether or not to look. It’s not the blood or the guns or even the bodies in piles that shock – though they do, and you’ll be haunted by what you’ve seen long after you leave. Maybe what makes these historical images so devastating is the tidy, efficient, business-like manner in which the killing was carried out. It’s how mundane, and rote, and everyday it all became. Like garbage pick-up or city sanitation. This wasn’t a crime of passion. This was institutionalized, factory-choreographed human slaughter. Committed not by some alien other, but by human beings. And the Nazis, pleased with their progress, rolled cameras and documented it. The shamelessness of the whole enterprise – can you imagine it? Look at the faces of some of the perpetrators. They don’t look disgusted or remorseful. They look grimly satisfied, the way anyone might after finishing up a particularly disagreeable chore. Their faces alone are terrifying. One of the last exhibits includes a film, shown in a theater built of stones carried over from Israel. In the film, a lovely older woman with dark hair describes the moment an American soldier liberated the factory where she and many other young Jewish women were being used as slave labor. The soldier himself, now much older, joins in with his version of events. The film cuts back and forth between them. He tells of walking into the factory, and seeing death on the faces of the starving women inside. She talks of how he opened the door for her and called her “Miss”, and how it seemed at that moment that humanity had returned. He tells of a dark-haired young girl who, improbably, quoted a line from Goethe to describe the hell all around him. She calls him an American, with the kind of wonder kids use to describe a superhero. And at the end she says, “And of course, now he is my husband.” I don’t know why exactly, but that moment is the one that has stayed with me. I can’t say that I left the Holocaust Museum feeling happy, but I did leave feeling hopeful. And that is the true wonder of the place. Admission is free – www.ushmm.org. I hope you’ll visit the next time you’re in D.C.

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