I usually do not post on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is too painful. This year I feel it is important to share my experience from my 2018 visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
I had not been there in 30 years and much had changed. You start walking at the top floor and the history unfolds as you go down each level.
I was amazed at how much I had forgotten. And I know a lot about the history. My emotions were building as I moved through the floors. Some images I could not look at. Then I got to the hall with the shoes. And I stopped and sobbed. And several people, total strangers walked by and gently touched my shoulder. Very sweetly. And to remind me…compassion survives.
Here are 23 images I am sharing and I welcome you to read the ones with text. I have chosen some because we are in the early stages of a fall down the sewer of authoritarianism, but there is still time to stop the descent, if we work together.
There are no images of violence here. So you need not fear them. Feel free to share any of them.
1-Outside the Building
2-The Victims
3-Eisenhower Statement
4-Where Books are Burned, In the End People WIll be Burned
5-The “Science” of Race
6-Anti-Jewish Laws
7-Night of Broken Glass
8-Enemies of the State
10-Police State
11-No Sanctuary in America
12-Albert Einstein Statement
13-Lost Communities 1
14-Lost Communities 2
15-Protests against Nazis 1
16-Protests against Nazis 2
17-Wall of Remembrance
18-Final Solution
19-Lodz Ghetto
20-Four Hundred Ghettos
21-Hungarians waiting near gas chambers at Auschwitz
22-Slave Labor
23-The Shoes
24-The Coverup attempted
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
Sander Feinberg US Holocaust Memorial
I just finished reading “One Family’s Shoah” by Herbert Lindenberger about a family that lived in Astoria, Oregon from 1900-1910. I ordered the book after researching the Lindenberger family for the Clatsop County Historical Society’s publication “Cumtux.” I’m glad I bought the book because it gives the author’s views through his research of the Shoah. Members of his family experienced it and the others agonized about it, but would not talk about it. When I started working on the story I was writing about the salmon packing business, I had no idea it was leading me into all these horrors. I had to know more about the family through Prof. Herbert Lindenberger’s book. It should be required reading in the schools just as your photo story should.