Gareth took us to Mechelen today, a quiet, old, Belgian town north of Brussels. The purpose of the trip played in to yesterday’s lecture on the roots of European history and the long way they’ve come in such little time. So he took us to the Museum of Jewish Deportation and Resistance. I was really moved and shaken up with the museum as a whole especially with the simple reminder that these horrors took place only 63 years ago!!
We walked into the courtyard of the former Nazi military building where they searched the Belgian Jews before shipping them off in trains to Auschwitz (picture on the right). Standing in that courtyard was absolutely bone chilling and the complete silence only added to the eeriness of it all. I was really affected by the information and graphic pictures inside the museum; two images in particular are still very much vivid in my head, which I’d rather not mention. And there were some rooms that were too much to bear. At the end of the museum they showed us a movie about a survivor who lost his wife and three young boys to the gas chambers. I couldn’t help but cry my eyes out.
It was the first time that man had ever shared his story, but he felt the urge to do so since he was getting old. Sure enough, he passed away some time after the interview.
Although I was terribly sad and upset, I’m happy Gareth took us there. It made me realize the importance of documenting these first-hand experiences, especially in an age where the generation of survivors is slowly fading away. It’s extremely important that we always remember what happened. I recall a story in the news not too long ago about a certain school distric in the US that wanted to exclude the Holocaust from it's curriculum, which is absolutely unacceptable. We can't let such a historic and catastrophic event fall through the cracks ... We simply must never forget.
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