Day 3- Holocaust Museum and the Dead Sea Scrolls

                                                                                                                Children’s section

The start of the tour

 Today is abut 66 degrees.

I am sorry but I can’t get the pictures to print  so I am posting this anyway.

We are off to the Holocaust museum . Our guide starts off with explaining that there are two days that are observed. One is the Solders Day which is a week day and one week later is Holocaust day. The sirens sound for two minutes.  Everything stops - even the cars stop in the middle of the road and people get out and stand for a moment of silence.

Now onto the Holocaust museum and the history.  She started with how did Hitler every get  the power he did . Her answer was the high inflation,  no one could get a job, therefore no money to eat or live. Nothing was worth anything.Hilter promised plenty of food, - a better life. It took 18 months for him to come up through the ranks and become dictator.

The next step was to eliminate the Jews. They were successful and had to be eliminated.

Hilter started the campaign with posters showing the Jew as a big bug sitting on the world with the long nose and legs.- with a money sign in there eyes.

In 1938 “the Night of the Broken Glass”  a raid began,  burning houses, business, and arresting 30,000 Jews. The jews tried to escape and leave the country but no one would take them.  This was the theme over and over.  Below is one of the worst accounting of an event.  We need to remember and learn.  But as you can see our world has not changed much.

Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where Einsatzgruppen mobile squads killed at least 34,000 Jews over a one week period in September 1941. Russian estimates put the number of killed at nearly 100,000. Today, Babi Yar has come to symbolize the horrific murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen as well as the persistent failure of the world to acknowledge this Jewish tragedy.

From the cemetery, the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine only two miles from the center of the city. A truck driver at the scene described what he saw:

I watched what happened when the Jews – men, women and children – arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly … I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked….

Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him.’

One of the last rooms we visited had pictures of the murdered Jews and around on the walls were 2,800,000 cubbies with a box in each  containing 30 pages - one for each person.  There are still 1,000,000 we know nothing about.

Our last room was the room of the children . A room in a tunnel that was dark and had candles shining for all the murdered children..

The shocking part is that at the Nuremburg trials 12 got the death sentence-3 life sentences-4 in prison and 3 acquitted.