Reflection On The Holocaust Museum

When I got home from the first day of class, I told my husband that one of my assignments was to go to a museum. I told him my choices are; The Museum of Natural Science, The Holocaust Museum, or an art museum. My husband is infatuated with the time in history where World War II, so he chose The Holocaust Museum and since he was doing the driving, we went to learn about the Holocaust. We made a date and last Sunday we went to see a very sobering time in history. What I learned about the Jewish history is that they had a very tortured past.

It started with Abraham and Sarah over 4,000 years ago, whose belief was: there was only one God. God promised Abraham that his ancestors would be a great nation. He fulfilled the promise by giving

In Spain, they were told to either turn to Christianity or leave. In the 1500s, while Martin Luther felt that God had deserted the Jews because they did not convert to Christianity. Other people didn’t like the Jews for other reasons; they are an easy group to blame for other’s problems, they had too much wealth, they were arrogant about being “the chosen people”, and worst of all, “we hate the Jews because they are an inferior race”.

In the early 1930s, the German Jews numbered about one percent in Germany. They adopted the culture of the German people, more than 100,000 Jews served in the German army in World War I and were decorated for their bravery. Between 1905 and 1936 fourteen of the thirty-eight Nobel prizes were awarded to the Jews livening in western Europe. They kept their traditions and were able to thrive in the European

Two-thirds of European Jews and one-third of the world’s Jewish population were murdered. When Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and France, the Jews were herded into ghettos where the conditions were terrible. The Jews suffered hunger, squalor, overcrowding sickness, and despair. In 1942 and 1943 the Nazis moved the Jews to Killing centers sin Poland, Betzec, Sobidor, Mejdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were herded onto trains with 80 to 100 or more people packed into a single box car. Many of the Jewish did not survive the train trip and those who did were either sent to gas chambers, shot or went into slave labor. Anything of value was taken away and sent to a German warehouse. They even cut their hair to make slippers and fill