Pilgrimage by Lynn Austin Page B

turn and continue to walk, reading and studying the displays as I go. The museum floor slopes subtly down as I witness the gradual, ominous progression of hatred. It spews from public billboards and magazine pages and newspapers. The Nazis enact laws against Jews. They are fired from their jobs. Their homes and businesses are confiscated, looted. Jews are required to sew yellow stars on their clothing. They are ridiculed and harassed in the streets. As the persecution intensifies, desperate families gather their belongings and try to emigrate, only to find that few nations will take them.
    Then comes Kristallnacht , “the night of broken glass,” when 267 synagogues are burned, countless holy books destroyed, and hundreds of Jews beaten and killed in anti-Jewish riots. I’m struck by how “harmlessly” and gradually it all began before spiraling into genocide so violent thatfew people could have conceived of it, let alone believed it would happen. But the proof is in front of me, documented in photographs and on film and in stories told by survivors.
    As I walk and listen and read, the doorways to the exhibits become narrower, the rooms smaller and more confining until I find myself in the middle of a jumbled maze. I’m surrounded by images of Jews being rounded up at gunpoint and forced into ghettos and concentration camps. I’ve become separated from my husband and stuffed into a very tight space with strangers. Confused and disoriented, I search for the way out or the way that I came in, but I can’t find either one. The lights are dim, the ceiling low. There are no windows.
    I’m lost.
    With nowhere to turn, I shuffle forward with the others and find that I’m being crammed into a railroad car like the ones that transported millions of Jews to their deaths. Claustrophobia sucks my breath away. I need to get out! Now!
    As my panic builds, I realize that this fear and disorientation are exactly what the architect intended. I’m being forced to experience the same emotions that Jews felt as their joyful, song-filled world descended into a nightmare. I take deep breaths to control my panic and persevere through the maze, studying the horrific pictures. Death camps. Crematoria. Mass executions. Piles of discarded shoes and shorn hair and tattered suitcases, left behind by people whose lives ended in unimaginable horror. I look into the haunting faces of the men, women, and children who are slowly being driven to their deaths and my tears flow unchecked. For a few searing hours, I am experiencing a tiny taste of the Holocaust, and I can barely endure it. I want to run, but I can’t escape. Neither could millions of Jews.
    Slowly, the rooms become larger, the displays more orderly as the photos show Allied help arriving, bringing hope. The floor gradually slopes up again as I near the end. Hitler’s forces retreat and surrender. The war ends. Salvation comes at last to survivors in the concentration camps and work camps. I see a photo of young Anne Frank, who longed to grow up and become an author like me, but who died of disease in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, six weeks before she would have been liberated.
    The memorial of Yad Vashem ends with another towering wall on the opposite end of the building from the movie screen that depicted Jewish life before the Holocaust. This second wall is made of glass, and on the other side of it is a stunning view of modern Jerusalem. I look out at homes and apartment buildings with laundry fluttering from balconies. Mothers push baby carriages down sidewalks, young students hurry to catch a bus, old men sit around café tables. It’s a view of treetops and hills and blue skies and streets pulsing with life. The prophet Zechariah might have envisioned this when he wrote these words about Israel’s future: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with a cane in hand because of his age.