Yad Vashem

There’s so much to see in Jerusalem itself, so when there’s weekends that my travel buddies and I either have too much work, didn’t get around to making reservations in a hostel or just ran out of food so we have to spend the morning at the market getting groceries, there’s still a lot to do and see in the city limits. It’s a little restrictive since, so many things still close early on Friday. One of the things that is always on the Must See list is Yad Vashem. The Holocaust Museum is very much what you would expect: depressing. It takes the history of the Holocaust from a distinctly Jewish perspective that is designed to make the Museum a truly emotional visit. Yad Vashem itself is in a beautiful part of the mountains on the outskirts of Jerusalem and the view before you enter the museum is absolutely breathtaking. As you enter the museum one of the first exhibits is the remains of things that were burned by the Nazis when the Allies began liberating the camps. Photographs, letters, watches. All these things were remnants of the lives of people that seem so easy to destroy. The other exhibits examine the rise of Nazism and anti- Semitism from propaganda to anti Semitic board games and yellow stars. The museum winds itself through the different rooms so it’s impossible to miss something. It also makes it a pain with all the tour groups since they are impossible to get around them.  As the path takes you though the museum it descends into the history of the Holocaust from their isolation in the Ghettos to the beginnings of the mass murders during Operation Barbossa, made even more haunting by videos of survivors and the remnants left behind of those that has died.  Leaving the main gallery take you to the Hall of Names, which commemorates all the Jews that died in the Holocaust, with 600 photographs and short biographies of the victims. Perhaps the most moving and depressing part of the entire museum was the Children’s Memorial. To get to it, we had to walk though a stunning garden and into this tiny underground tunnel into a pitch black hall. It is so dark that it is impossible to see anything, even after your eyes adjust. As we reached the end, we could hear a female voice reading off names, locations and ages of all these children at time of death. Finally, after coming out of the pitch blackness there’s little pinpricks of light ahead and entering the main room, there’s hundreds of little lights surrounding the path in this pitch dark room while the woman kept reading. There’s one candle in the center of the exhibit and the light from it is reflected around the room by mirrors, creating this illusion of  these hundreds of stars symbolizing all these children.