Both Barb and I were stunned by the powerful imagery of the exhibit. It is something everyone should see.
One exhibit in particular was very hard to view. A virtual "river" of shoes, taken from the victims of Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland, is accompanied by this poem, by Yiddish poet Moses Schulstein:
We are the shoes
We are the last witnesses
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire.
It made us both weep. How an entire country of people could be mesmerized into permitting such abominable acts to happen seems beyond comprehension.
And yet, today we as a society are committing many of the same acts of ommission by not speaking out forcefully against what the government is doing as those in Germany committed by not taking an active position against the Nazis.
No, I am NOT saying that what George Bush and Dick Cheney are doing today is equivalent to what Hitler ultimately did. Yet. But Hitler didn't start out in the first year by murdering 6,000,000 Jews either. He started out by coopting the populace with his positions, by convincing them that he could be "trusted" and only then, after he had secured that trust, did he abuse it by committing acts of genocide that are incomprehensible.
On the walls of the Holocaust museum are the words of Dutch pastor Martin Neimoller, at one time an anti-Semite, but later a strong anti-Nazi who was himself imprisoned in Dachau. There are many variations of this quote but the overall intent is the important thing:
First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews
and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.
And when they finally came for me
there was no one left to speak up.
We in America are certainly not yet at the moment when "they came for the Jews", but we very well may be at the figurative moment when they are coming "for the Communists" (the terrorists).
Should we be coming for the terrorists? I think any right-minded person would say that if you can prove someone is a terrorist who has killed (or even is definitively planning on killing) other people, of course we should.
But there must be a limit. The minute we sacrifice the civil rights of the people who commit crimes in the name of expediency or "national security", we have clearly crossed over the same line that Hitler crossed over in Germany. While we aren't (at least as far as we know it yet) committing genocide, we are jailing people for many years without due process (Guantanamo), and we are committing serious forms of torture (Abu Graib) and we are turning people over to other governments to carry out that torture because they have fewer laws that need to be skirted. We are clearly starting to become the very thing we have in past wars fought against.
It is interesting that during the "dawn of HAiR" in 1967, we protested against the war in Vietnam but that was mostly because we were opposed to the sacrifice of American lives in a useless and unnecessary cause. In 2007, we are not only sacrificing American lives in another useless war, but we are sacrificing American freedoms as well, in the name of freedom for others, and we seem less concerned today than we did 40 years ago. For shame.
Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
As the Holocaust Museum warns, We Must Always Remember.
After leaving the Museum, we had a sober but very good lunch at a local cafe, Vie de France just about a block away from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We then crossed Independence Avenue and went in to the Smithsonian.
The Air and Space Museum is a monument to what is both good and not so good in America. The exhibits on the historic genius of the Wright Brothers, Curtiss, Douglas, Goddard, etc., all pioneers of aviation, are fascinating. Seeing the actual Wright flying machine that was flown at Kitty Hawk in 1903 (recovered in new cloth but still sporting all the original wood and engine) was amazing. As a long-time fan of aviation and space (and as a former pilot), I get a thrill seeing some of the planes of by-gone eras. Getting to look at the actual Apollo space capsule that circled the moon is awesome.
Unfortunately, our adventures in the air and in space have always been coupled with the militaristic aspects of those ventures. The thrill of looking at a Saturn rocket, only used to send people for the first time on voyages of great discovery, must be tempered with the sadness that it stands next to a Titan rocket whose principal mission was to be prepared to deliver the warheads that would, if ever used, probably plunge all humankind into darkness for centuries. Seeing the Spirit of St. Louis that crossed the Atlantic on a mission of expanding horizons is juxtaposed with the F-104 Starfighter, whose only mission is the killing of other human beings.
While I have always sympathized somewhat with people who argued "Why do we spend hundreds of millions to explore the empty reaches of space when we could better use that money here on Earth?" I have also felt that exploration and invention are important aspects of our being who we are. What is sadder is that if we stopped spending Billions (and in the case of the Iraq war, TENS of Billions) on killing our fellow human beings senselessly, we would have money to not only spend on human suffering here at home but we would STILL have plenty of money to explore space. There is no reason we can't do both if we just stopped the waste of money and lives in the pursuit of power and profit.
In another of those weird little coincidences that happen in our lives, our last stop on Monday was the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and while we only had about one half hour there, we got to see many really amazing portraits. The one that tickled Barb and me the most was probably the daguerrotype of P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb.
So what is the weird little coincidence? Keep in mind our earlier visit to the Holocaust Museum and read on.
My sister-in-law Sophie Hayden (who later went on to get a Tony nomination for her performance as Rosabella in the revival of Most Happy Fella in 1992) was in the original production of Barnum on Broadway with Jim Dale. Seeing that little four-square-inch portrait of Mr. Barnum and his star attraction just as they were portrayed in the musical, taken and preserved on a metal plate since the middle 1800's was way cool!
The coincidence is that Sophie ALSO portrayed Mrs. Otto Frank in the Lincoln Center revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, with Natalie Portman and George Hearn (who played Mr. Frank, her husband). It struck me as we were heading home that we saw both of those "moments" in history at the Holocaust Museum and at the Smithsonian, just as I had seen Sophie portray them on stage. Weird and funny in a very minute way, n'est pas?
After a good Chinese dinner in the "Chinatown" section of Washington, we headed back to the hotel and promptly fell asleep.
It definitely had been a long day.
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