Witness to Tolerance

This really happened. These events occurred in real life and affected real people. This fact is difficult to wrap your head around when you’re an 8th grader learning about the most famous genocide in recent history; the Holocaust. We recently toured the Museum of Tolerance, which is a museum designed to educate people about this horrific tragedy. The experience is nothing like learning about it in a sheltered classroom, where the bell rings and breaks you out of their world and back into yours. The Museum of Tolerance put you in the shoes of the millions of Jews who were forced from their homes and murdered. This 3 hour experience of our tour guide’s raspy but powerful voice describing the worst acts of humanity, simulated gas chambers, and the chilling words of Adolf Hitler and his followers being read out over loudspeakers will make you come out a different person than you were before you entered. The museum excels at bringing out your empathy. Their terror becomes your terror,  and their suffering becomes your suffering. The sensory experience made you forget about the honking of LA traffic outside and put you in 1940s Germany. TVs lined the walls, displaying photographs of mass graves piled with dead bodies while recordings played of laughing Nazi generals telling their compatriots to finish their drinks. Our tour guide brought us to a model of the gates of hell and beyond. Many of us cried for them and their pain, but some felt detached because they didn’t want to think about all the innocent men, women, and children who were murdered with no remorse. They lived and died in the past. We can’t change what happened to them, so what are we supposed to do to help them? This question has been asked many times, and our guide gave us an answer. We have a responsibility to make sure everyone remembers the horrors of the Holocaust so it may never happen again.