Witness

You are my witnesses. Isaiah 43:10

Those words inscribed on a wall of black granite - that's the first thing you see when you walk into the U.S. National Holocaust Memorial Museum. A humbling beginning.

We spent two full afternoons at the Holocaust Memorial. There is much to disturb the mind and heart within those walls, iconic photos and stories all around, Hitler's voice booming out, artifacts that shake you - a pile of thousands of shoes confiscated from prisoners arriving in Majdanek, a section of the train tracks that led into Treblinka. A thousand more.

Two things stood out to me - the row of tall, inward curving fence posts from Auschwitz itself, and the pile of square stones quarried from Mauthausen forced labor camp. The prisoners were known to say that each stone quarried there cost the life of one man. And there those stones lie - 193 stones, 193 lives. And those fence posts. How many lives were lost because of them? They were a dividing line between life and death.

On the ground floor of the Museum is a beautiful Hall of Remembrance. It is a solemn, simple space designed for reflection and memorial - a large, circular room lit only by a rose window in the high ceiling and tall, narrow windows, at the same time imposing and inviting. Directly across from the entrance is a rectangular altar of black stone inside in which lies dirt from 38 concentration camps and a cemetery in Europe where American soldiers are buried. The dirt was brought to America in urns and deposited inside the granite block by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Above the altar a large candle burns, and this inscription from Deuteronomy 4:9 is inscribed into the stone wall:

"Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children and to your children's children."

On either side of the room in small alcoves are banks of tiny candles. I lit a candle in memory of Tim's Uncle Eugene who fought in Germany, and almost gave his life in a POW camp; in memory of our family's trip to Dachau in Germany and the impact that had on my young life; and in memory of those who suffered and died at the hands of both evil and complacent men.

Evil and complacent men.

www.ushmm.org