D.C. - Day 5 - Holocaust Museum & Washington Memorial

Today was supposed to be "memorial" day, where we visited the holocaust museum and all the memorials. Fat chance! We started out right. First we went to the U.S. Holocaust museum and stood in line for tickets. While I waited in that line, Dean went to the Washington Memorial and stood in line for those tickets. Tickets obtained by 10:30am, we were ready to go, starting with the Holocaust museum.

The museum is designed from top-to-bottom to take you away from Washington D.C. and immerse you into the experience of Jews during the holocaust. Starting with the architecture (which we attended a lecture about), there is an outer facade that makes the museum look very inviting and hospital from the outside. But as soon as you walk past the facade, it all changes. Now it is all grey concrete, industrial galvanized metal, and heavy brick. The angles of the building and positions of the windows produce uncomfortably gloomy shadows. The arched entrances invoke the memory of the arched entryways of the camps and even the arched openings of the cremation ovens. The steel girders, the stairway leading up, the appearance of rust in spots, all remind one of the trains and railroads pulling into a death camp or the factories of the forced labor camps. There are almost no signs anywhere. This deliberate choice invokes confusion. Patrons don't know where to go -- they are forced to ask, or more often, to follow the crowd like cattle. There are security guards everywhere, several even have guard dogs.

The whole experience is visceral, impacting at a subconscious level too deep even for easily identifiable emotions.

To enter the permanent exhibit (no picture taking permitted), you take an ID Card. This passport-like ID card identifies you with a real person who survived the holocaust and provides a picture and background of the person. Mine was a boy named Joseph. He was a pre-teen gypsy who was separated from his parents. While at school, Nazis forcibly pulled him out of class telling the teacher that he needed an emergency appendicitis. Actually, he was forcibly sterilized by nazi doctors (because gypsies were considered an inferior race, they were not permitted to breed...). After escaping from a concentration camp, he hid in a barn for 5 months until the end of the war.

The exhibit contained hundreds of video clips, thousands of pictures, a room filled with shoes taken from the victims, 20lb. packages of human hair that were shaved from the victims, sold, and turned stuffing for mattresses and pillows and other useful things. In addition to all the exhibits, they also had the visitors walking on the actual cobblestones from one of the ghettos, and one of the wood bridges that Jews were forced to use because they were not permitted to be on the street. And there was a large model of a gas chamber, and inside that, surrounded by concrete half-walls to prevent accidental viewing, were tv monitors showing some of the worst videos one could see, literally too horrible to describe.

One thing I learned that I didn't know was about the pink triangle. I thought the pink triangle was a symbol that GLBT chose for themselves like the rainbow. I did not know that the pink triangle was chosen by Hitler to identify homosexuals like yellow stars of David identified Jews, purple triangles identified gypsies and black triangles identified Jehovah witnesses. Given that history, I wonder why GLBT choose to use the pink triangle at all.

One particular set of pictures struck me: a picture of a naked boy and another of a naked girl, both mentally disabled, taken just before they were killed. I can't even begin to explain how monstrous it all is.

I was frequently at war with myself. Part of me approved of the museum and desired that this story be told, laid out for everyone to see and remember. Another part of me wanted to destroy the building and throw everything into a live volcano like the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings -- because it is so evil, such an abomination (I cannot think of a better word), that it cannot be permitted to stay, it MUST be expunged from the earth.

In addition to the permanent exhibit, there were smaller special exhibits, one designed for children, another about genocide in Rwanda and Darfur (wherein the question is asked, "We said, 'never forget', but what about Rwanda? What about Darfur?"). Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we could not visit these exhibits at all. After our tour, we left.

Next we had to hoof it over to the Washington monument for our scheduled visit at 1:30pm. On the way, we wolfed down a hot dog and a coke at a nearby vendor. I was a little surprised that there is so little inside the monument besides the elevator. There really isn't that much you can do. Once at the top, it was a lot like the St. Louis arch. 8 windows along all sides of the obelisk give you a 360 degree view of up to 30 miles. A bit crowded, but not as bad as the St.Louis Arch was. After taking a few pictures, we took the elevator back down. Here's a picture of the White House that I took from one of the windows:


After we were done with the Washington monument at nearly 3pm, we came to the conclusion that the memorials were just too far apart, requiring too much walking to be able to see them all today. We decided instead to call it an early day, go home, and then plan on going to Crystal City in the evening for dinner (Crystal City is the area I lived in for 2 years, and consists of a collection of hotels, shops, and restaurants in an expensive part of VA).

Once we got back to the hotel, we decided to book a night tour as the best way for us to actually see the memorials. So after some online research, I booked a night tour for tomorrow night that goes from 7pm to 10pm that hits all the major memorials plus the capitol and the white house. The memorials are supposed to be great at night because they are beautifully lit and make for great pictures. So I'm looking forward to that.

By the time I got that done, we looked up when Crystal City closes. I didn't count on the fact that it closed at 7pm (I thought it closed at 9pm). As soon as we found that out, we tried to get there by leaving the hotel for the Metro at 5pm, but we immediately got stuck in traffic at 7 Corners (this is the same intersection I wrote about before where 4 different highways converge and form 7 different streets in one intersection). After waiting for about 15-20 minutes at that intersection, we realized that if we made it to Crystal City at all, it would probably be just a few minutes before closing. So we abandoned that idea and turned into the first restaurant we saw, which happened to be Bennigan's (sort of like an Irish Applebee's). Dean had a pretty good salmon and rice, whilst I had a pasta and chicken dish that sounded much better on the menu than it looked or tasted in real life.

Now we're back at the hotel, and I'm blogging and getting ready to upload pictures. Stay tuned for when I have the pictures up. Okay, here they are:
http://community.webshots.com/album/560599684hsPeVa
http://travel.webshots.com/album/560598003ERSohm