We’d gone down to the waterfront during low tide to scope things out, Mr. Mo and I, and got to see a few “Wild Kingdom” moments (notably one seagull choking down a surprisingly large sea star and another gull playing with its food — a baby eel). We eventually went back up on Lenora Street toward our apartment building. When we got to the corner of Second and Lenora, I realized that the Holocaust Museum (right there) was open (as it is only on Sundays and on the first Thursday of the month), and as the event we’d been planning to attend at noon had been pushed back a couple of hours, I decided to go in.
Officially the Holocaust Center for Humanity, it is a relatively small space, with a large part devoted to a lecture or viewing room where I watched an excellent, 25-minute video about the events and conditions that led to Hitler’s rise in power and the atrocities that followed. Part of the video featured the first-hand accounts of the now very elderly survivors, including those who had ended up settling in Seattle. One man from Poland related how a Christian family hid him (then a young teen) and his family in the hayloft of their small attached barn for 18 months. During that time, he never saw daylight, never was able to stand up, ate only one scant meal a day, and talked only in whispers. He weighed less than 90 lbs when they were liberated, and his muscles were so atrophied that he couldn’t walk.
One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by those stories and photos and films, along with some of the artifacts on display, including several pairs of shoes and other items on loan from Auschwitz.
I talked with the volunteer docent about having lived part-time in Berlin over a 10-year period prior to the pandemic, and about having visited the Judische (Jewish) Museum in Berlin just this past January. She had been to the Jewish Museum, so she knew what I was talking about when I told her through tears that the room that had most affected me while there was the one with the floor-to-ceiling banners showing all of the laws that were passed after Hitler took power — laws that stripped the Jews of their rights and livelihoods and their German citizenship.
Banners with the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish Museum, Berlin.
I had read about the Nuremberg Laws before, but seeing them listed there, all together, and realizing that such laws were enacted at all levels in Germany — federal, state, and local — had been overwhelming. I still find it hard to believe how easily and how quickly Hitler was able to codify such hatred.
What most affected me throughout my short visit yesterday was — how quickly Trump and his minions are moving to consolidate power, and how completely heedless or ignorant of history so many Americans are not to be able to see what is happening right under their very noses. — Or worse yet, how many of our fellow citizens don’t seem to have a problem with it.
The docent obviously saw the parallels. She talked with me a bit more after I went into the small library wing where there had been a recent exhibit about Anne Frank. We need to keep showing up at the protests and demonstrations while we still can, she said. We need to honor the memory of those who died by working to keep the rising evil at bay.
Oh, but it is so heartbreaking that this, that THIS should be happening here.
