Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2004-07-18 06:56 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2004-07-18 06:56 pm
(no subject)
I think I'm in love with my CD ripper... see, on the old computer, if the CD was even a little bit scratched it'd freak and stop reading it altogether, but somehow on this computer you can't even tell. Thus, I can now listen in peace and rapture to "Adios," "Light," and the Vienna rendition of "Wandering Child," all of which are rather scratched up on the CDs they originate on.
Before I leave for camp (from which location I go directly to Simon's Rock in August) my dad and I are doing the DC tourist thing, hitting a bunch of museums and memorials, mostly the ones we haven't spent too much time in before: the National Gallery of Art, the Air and Space Museum (actually, I've been there far too many times), the new WWII memorial, etc. And today we did the Holocaust Museum. If it was their goal to make the most depressing museum in the entire country, they succeeded. Fantastically. It wasn't the blown-up photographs and the little explanatory blurbs that did it, or the inane fifteen-minute film on the Nazi rise to power--most of that I already knew. It was the artifacts that did it for me: videotapes of speeches and rallies; a Gypsy wagon with a violin that belonged to a boy who was killed; letters, still legible, from the Warsaw ghetto; one of the train cars (or a reconstruction of one) that took prisoners to concentration camps; thousands upon thousands of old, battered shoes, stripped from people's feet after they were gassed and piled up until they filled the room; the door to a gas chamber itself, along with inert Zyklon B capsules; the very same three-tiered bunks that filled the barracks. There were two moments that really stood out in my mind, one at the beginning and one in the middle. At the very first exhibit, on the Nazi rise to power, a little girl tugged on her mother's sleeve and asked, "Mommmy? Who's Hitler?" And the mom tried to explain, and the little girl said, "Oh. Was he a bad man?" And the mom said yes, and spent about five minutes trying to show her daughter which one of the men in the picture on the wall was Hitler. The second one took place in the exhibit on the Polish ghettoes--the father of a German family reading aloud to his family the letter from the ghetto, in the original, not the crappy English translation. I don't know what made those two moments stand out to me, but they did.
Before I leave for camp (from which location I go directly to Simon's Rock in August) my dad and I are doing the DC tourist thing, hitting a bunch of museums and memorials, mostly the ones we haven't spent too much time in before: the National Gallery of Art, the Air and Space Museum (actually, I've been there far too many times), the new WWII memorial, etc. And today we did the Holocaust Museum. If it was their goal to make the most depressing museum in the entire country, they succeeded. Fantastically. It wasn't the blown-up photographs and the little explanatory blurbs that did it, or the inane fifteen-minute film on the Nazi rise to power--most of that I already knew. It was the artifacts that did it for me: videotapes of speeches and rallies; a Gypsy wagon with a violin that belonged to a boy who was killed; letters, still legible, from the Warsaw ghetto; one of the train cars (or a reconstruction of one) that took prisoners to concentration camps; thousands upon thousands of old, battered shoes, stripped from people's feet after they were gassed and piled up until they filled the room; the door to a gas chamber itself, along with inert Zyklon B capsules; the very same three-tiered bunks that filled the barracks. There were two moments that really stood out in my mind, one at the beginning and one in the middle. At the very first exhibit, on the Nazi rise to power, a little girl tugged on her mother's sleeve and asked, "Mommmy? Who's Hitler?" And the mom tried to explain, and the little girl said, "Oh. Was he a bad man?" And the mom said yes, and spent about five minutes trying to show her daughter which one of the men in the picture on the wall was Hitler. The second one took place in the exhibit on the Polish ghettoes--the father of a German family reading aloud to his family the letter from the ghetto, in the original, not the crappy English translation. I don't know what made those two moments stand out to me, but they did.