History | Antisemitism | Bigotry

Never Forget: Looking Back on the Holocaust

Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum is harrowing. You should go anyway.

It was hard to look at the recreations of carnage. I went anyway. Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I don’t know how to describe the feeling I had as I looked down from the platform to the line of tracks below.

I was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, surrounded by the recorded history of the worst crime humanity has ever perpetrated against ourselves. The entire Memorial is an exercise in solemn remembrance and agony, but this section struck home in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

In front of me was an old wooden railcar. In order to pass through to the next section of the museum, I had to step into the car and move through the cramped, dim hold to reach the ramp leading across a gap in the floor.

I wasn’t sure at the time if that was a real artifact, something that came from one of the railway lines used in the mass deportations and camp systems.

But I knew that the train tracks were real. I knew they were part of the actual railway lines, the metal rungs upon which the Nazi regime transported millions of human beings. I even knew where the tracks came from.