To Jim and Barbara…We must always remember to be good neighbors…Jay M. Ipson.” These words, written as part of an autograph by a Holocaust survivor, settled upon us as a mantle of remembrance and responsibility as we left the Virginia Holocaust Museum in downtown Richmond and began our drive back to the RV park.
We had decided to visit a couple of historic sites today and chose the Holocaust Museum as our first stop. We first heard about it last September when we took a boat ride on the canal and it was pointed out by the guide as a point of interest. Little did we know what was in store for us as we made 16 mile ride into town and navigated the sometimes confusing streets leading down to an old tobacco warehouse that now houses the most remarkable museum either of us has ever seen.
As we got to our destination, 2000 East Cary Street, we found that we were at
the site of the old Libby Prison, a detention center for Union soldiers who were held as prisoners of war during the American Civil War. A section of the prison was later dismantled and shipped to Chicago for use as a museum, but was subsequently torn down to make room for a coliseum. Markers on the site told stories of prisoners who were crowded together in unimaginable conditions, who were lice-infested, and who barely survived on substandard daily provisions...a slight foreshadowing of what we were to experience in sights and sounds as we toured the Virginia Holocaust Museum.
As we approached the building, one of the things we saw was an
old boxcar, with German railroad markings, sitting on tracks directly in front of the museum. As we walked around it, we found one of the side doors open. Inside was a table full of candleholders where visitors to the site could light candles in remembrance of those who died, and others whose lives were ripped asunder during that awful period known as the Third Reich - the time of Adolf Hitler’s rule over Germany - and the invasion of so many neighboring countries by the German Army in support of the Nazi party.
The boxcar was much smaller than those that we see pulled by American trains, and it was commonly used as a cattle car. The use of this type of rail car was both practical and symbolic, dehumanizing the Jews that they carried – reducing them to the same status
as cattle, and providing space to pack up to 100 persons at a time for transport to detention centers or concentration camps. Once the doors were closed, there was no room to sit during the rides that could take up to twenty days. People would die standing up, and might fall to the floor if those around them shifted a little. There were times when the guards along the way would shoot through the walls of the cars, randomly killing or wounding the passengers.
Leaving the train car to enter the museum, we were immediately struck by both the symbolic décor and the starkness of the short walk to the
front doors. On each side of the walkway 
was a section of railroad track that had been part of the German rail lines. In a glassed in area directly behind the tracks were cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto, objects of purely functional value in a normal setting, but reminders today of the most horrible time in modern human history.
Upon entering the building, we were directed by a docent to a small auditorium where we viewed a 15-minute video presentation featuring six Richmond residents who were survivors of the Holocaust and had later immigrated to the United States. With tears in their eyes and voices shaken with emotion, they told of the unimaginable horrors they had experienced. One lady, after telling about how the people in her neighborhood had been rounded up, and how a young man had been pulled from the crowd by a soldier and shot said, “I will never forget it. I saw it…with my own eyes I saw it.”
After watching the video, we went back to the registration and picked up a small booklet that gave a description of the self-guided tour. We were told that flash photography was not permitted in the museum, but that we could take pictures without the flash. We were concerned that we wouldn’t get any good pictures, but it turned out that many of the photos have a stark quality that emphasizes the somber setting of the exhibits.
The museum has 23 rooms of exhibits, each dedicated to a phase of life faced by the Jews and other “undesirables” who were targeted first for displacement through emigration, and then for annihilation. Motion detectors and hidden floor panels trigger lights and sounds as the visitors enter new areas. Recorded transcriptions of Russian and German newscasts and general warnings of the time are played as one enters certain areas, bringing a sense of immediacy and reality to the viewer.
The first exhibit is of the railroad station, generally the first step into a hellish nightmare for.jpg)
those whose religion, politics, or lifestyles were in conflict with the politics of the Nazi Party. The reader would do well to remember that while Jews were the primary target of the party, others, including gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and Christians who opposed Hitler and his regime, were systematically rounded up summarily killed or sent to the death camps.
The reality of the horror started to sink in as we left the train station and entered
the Dachau and Buchenwald exhibit halls. Mannequins, representing the several classes of prisoners, dressed in prison uniforms with a colored triangle (designating their classification), were crammed into narrow bunks…ten times the number of men for which 
the bunks were originally designed. In one corner of the room was an exhibit demonstrating two kinds of “medical” experiments that were used on the prisoners. The first showed a man strapped into a parachute harness and hanging suspen
ded in a large glass vacuum tube. The experiment was supposedly to test the effects of 
low pressure and lack of oxygen on humans. Another “experiment” was to put a person in a large tub of freezing water to test his reactions to long-term submersion. He was then taken out and various methods of bringing his body temperature back to normal (sunlamps and boiling water, etc). When the experiments were concluded, the subject, if not killed by it, was then murdered and his organs removed for “medical research” for the Luftwaffe (German air force). These and other so-called medical experiments were nothing more than cruel tortures designed to produce stark terror in the prisoners and provide entertainment for sadistic “doctors.”
November 9, 1938 – Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass
In a fifteen hour rampage, Nazis and their sympathizers.jpg)
pillaged Jewish neighborhoods and set them aflame. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and stores and synagogues were destroyed and their contents stolen or thrown into the streets. Jews were dragged out of their houses and beaten and shot. Even the F.W. Woolworth store, owned by Christian Germans, was destroyed because it was locally operated by a Jewish businessman.
The SS St. Louis
Prior to the German invasion of Poland and the subsequent beginning of World War II, many Jews tried to emigrate from Germany. In one such endeavor, approximately 900 Jews boarded the SS St. Louis, a German ship departing from Hamburg and heading to Cuba, in May, 1939. Arriving in the Havana Harbor, only 28 persons were allowed to disembark, even though the others had paid their fares and held visas that would permit them to enter the country.
The ship’s captain then sailed toward Florida, but was stopped by vessels of the United States Coast Guard. The captain and a committee of passengers requested help from the United States, but were denied. An appeal was made to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the captain was informed on June 5 that he would not be able to dock.
On June 6, the ship turned back to Europe. Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and England allowed entry to their countries, but within months, war was declared and much of western Europe was occupied by German troops. All who sailed, except for those allowed entry to England, were back in the hands of the very captors whom they had tried to escape.
The Kovno Ghetto
Jay Ipson and his family personally experienced life in the Kovno, Lithuania, Ghetto. As a young boy, he lived there with his parents and his maternal grandparents. The museum houses an.jpg)
extremely realistic setting of a section of the ghetto, complete with armed guards and barbed wire fences.
As the Jews entered the ghetto, they surrendered nearly all of their personal possessions. Confined like criminals, they had to wear the yellow Star of David. Any attempt to flee usually ended in being shot by one of the guards or soldiers. The dead were left on the streets as reminders of what could happen to those who broke the rules.
Hunger was a constant companion..jpg)
The weekly ration for an adult consisted of 2 ounces of salt, three ounces of grain, 4 ounces of flour, 4 ounces of meat, 2 slices of bread, and a handful of vegetables. The penalty for trying to smuggle food into the ghetto was death by shooting or public hanging. Everyone who visits the museum can see a replica of Mec, a teenage friend of the Ipsons, who was hanged for attempting to smuggle in a loaf of bread for his ill and starving mother. All residents of the ghetto were ordered out to watch the hanging.
The following is taken from the museum guide book, “To See, To Feel, To Know: Experiencing the Holocaust through the Virginia Holocaust Museum.”
The Ipson family attended the Nieh Shul (New Synagogue). One day, the Nazis issued a command for the residents to take their pets to the synagogue. Their obedience was rewarded with the slaughter of these animals within the house of worship. The cruel vileness was two-fold: Nazis killed the pets loved by the families, and the blood from the animals rendered Nieh Shul unclean for worship. The fur from the pets was used for gloves and earmuffs for the German military, the meat was returned to the families as rations.”
Within the Kovno Ghetto was a place called Democratic Square. On October 28, 1941, 27,000 citizens of the ghetto were ordered to line up and march to the center of the square where SS Sergeant Helmut Rauca decided whether they would die that day, or be spared until a later time. As he calmly sat eating a sandwich, Sergeant Rauca ordered men to state their profession. With a flip of his riding crop, he would send them to the right or the left, depending on their answer. The men and their families dismissed to the left were usually well-educated professionals, for whom the Reich had no use. At the end of the day, 9,200 doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, musicians, and their family members were marched to the Ninth Fort, a center of genocide during WW II. The next morning, they were ordered to take off all their clothes and stand naked at the edge of a ditch. They were then shot in the back of the head and either fell or were thrown into the ditch and buried, some of them still alive.
Jay Ipson’s father, a lawyer, stood in the line before Sergeant Rauca. When his turn came, he told him that he was an auto mechanic. His and his family’s lives were spared that day, but the next morning he was ordered to fix an automobile, something he had never done. With luck and some borrowed tools, he managed to replace a broken U-joint on the vehicle. The Nazi who had ordered him to perform the work made him the shop foreman!
The Ipson’s Hiding Place
After managing to escape from the ghetto, the Ipsons contacted a farmer who was a friend of the family. When they asked for help, he allowed them to dig a hiding place between two large holes where potatoes were stored in the ground. For three weeks the family hid in the house while Jay’s father dug and constructed an underground hiding place between the potato holes. He fashioned tunnels leading from the hiding place to both potato holes, allowing them a way to get out if necessary.
For six months the family, now numbering thirteen, lived underground in a small “room” measuring 12 feet by 9 feet by 4 feet high. There was no light and not enough oxygen to keep a match or candle burning. The only oxygen they had was provided by a pipe that extended above ground to a dog kennel. They could not bather or change clothes during that time. Jay’s father and an uncle would risk leaving the hiding place under the cover of night to secure food from the farmer or to forage for something to eat. They had nothing but the hope that they could outlast the Nazi regime and someday return to some sort of normal life.
The museum exhibit replicates the hiding place very well.
We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through a dark tunnel to get to the “room,” where we were able to sit on the floor and see the 13 mannequins representing the family members. Only a dim red light was available…far more than the family had. We then exited by crawling through another tunnel to the other potato hole. It didn’t take long for a touch of fear and claustrophobia to set in. That someone actually lived in those circumstances for six months is beyond imagination.
We had decided to visit a couple of historic sites today and chose the Holocaust Museum as our first stop. We first heard about it last September when we took a boat ride on the canal and it was pointed out by the guide as a point of interest. Little did we know what was in store for us as we made 16 mile ride into town and navigated the sometimes confusing streets leading down to an old tobacco warehouse that now houses the most remarkable museum either of us has ever seen.
As we got to our destination, 2000 East Cary Street, we found that we were at
the site of the old Libby Prison, a detention center for Union soldiers who were held as prisoners of war during the American Civil War. A section of the prison was later dismantled and shipped to Chicago for use as a museum, but was subsequently torn down to make room for a coliseum. Markers on the site told stories of prisoners who were crowded together in unimaginable conditions, who were lice-infested, and who barely survived on substandard daily provisions...a slight foreshadowing of what we were to experience in sights and sounds as we toured the Virginia Holocaust Museum.As we approached the building, one of the things we saw was an
old boxcar, with German railroad markings, sitting on tracks directly in front of the museum. As we walked around it, we found one of the side doors open. Inside was a table full of candleholders where visitors to the site could light candles in remembrance of those who died, and others whose lives were ripped asunder during that awful period known as the Third Reich - the time of Adolf Hitler’s rule over Germany - and the invasion of so many neighboring countries by the German Army in support of the Nazi party.The boxcar was much smaller than those that we see pulled by American trains, and it was commonly used as a cattle car. The use of this type of rail car was both practical and symbolic, dehumanizing the Jews that they carried – reducing them to the same status
as cattle, and providing space to pack up to 100 persons at a time for transport to detention centers or concentration camps. Once the doors were closed, there was no room to sit during the rides that could take up to twenty days. People would die standing up, and might fall to the floor if those around them shifted a little. There were times when the guards along the way would shoot through the walls of the cars, randomly killing or wounding the passengers.Leaving the train car to enter the museum, we were immediately struck by both the symbolic décor and the starkness of the short walk to the
front doors. On each side of the walkway 
was a section of railroad track that had been part of the German rail lines. In a glassed in area directly behind the tracks were cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto, objects of purely functional value in a normal setting, but reminders today of the most horrible time in modern human history.Upon entering the building, we were directed by a docent to a small auditorium where we viewed a 15-minute video presentation featuring six Richmond residents who were survivors of the Holocaust and had later immigrated to the United States. With tears in their eyes and voices shaken with emotion, they told of the unimaginable horrors they had experienced. One lady, after telling about how the people in her neighborhood had been rounded up, and how a young man had been pulled from the crowd by a soldier and shot said, “I will never forget it. I saw it…with my own eyes I saw it.”
After watching the video, we went back to the registration and picked up a small booklet that gave a description of the self-guided tour. We were told that flash photography was not permitted in the museum, but that we could take pictures without the flash. We were concerned that we wouldn’t get any good pictures, but it turned out that many of the photos have a stark quality that emphasizes the somber setting of the exhibits.
The museum has 23 rooms of exhibits, each dedicated to a phase of life faced by the Jews and other “undesirables” who were targeted first for displacement through emigration, and then for annihilation. Motion detectors and hidden floor panels trigger lights and sounds as the visitors enter new areas. Recorded transcriptions of Russian and German newscasts and general warnings of the time are played as one enters certain areas, bringing a sense of immediacy and reality to the viewer.
The first exhibit is of the railroad station, generally the first step into a hellish nightmare for
.jpg)
those whose religion, politics, or lifestyles were in conflict with the politics of the Nazi Party. The reader would do well to remember that while Jews were the primary target of the party, others, including gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and Christians who opposed Hitler and his regime, were systematically rounded up summarily killed or sent to the death camps.The reality of the horror started to sink in as we left the train station and entered
the Dachau and Buchenwald exhibit halls. Mannequins, representing the several classes of prisoners, dressed in prison uniforms with a colored triangle (designating their classification), were crammed into narrow bunks…ten times the number of men for which 
the bunks were originally designed. In one corner of the room was an exhibit demonstrating two kinds of “medical” experiments that were used on the prisoners. The first showed a man strapped into a parachute harness and hanging suspen
ded in a large glass vacuum tube. The experiment was supposedly to test the effects of 
low pressure and lack of oxygen on humans. Another “experiment” was to put a person in a large tub of freezing water to test his reactions to long-term submersion. He was then taken out and various methods of bringing his body temperature back to normal (sunlamps and boiling water, etc). When the experiments were concluded, the subject, if not killed by it, was then murdered and his organs removed for “medical research” for the Luftwaffe (German air force). These and other so-called medical experiments were nothing more than cruel tortures designed to produce stark terror in the prisoners and provide entertainment for sadistic “doctors.”November 9, 1938 – Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass
In a fifteen hour rampage, Nazis and their sympathizers
.jpg)
pillaged Jewish neighborhoods and set them aflame. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and stores and synagogues were destroyed and their contents stolen or thrown into the streets. Jews were dragged out of their houses and beaten and shot. Even the F.W. Woolworth store, owned by Christian Germans, was destroyed because it was locally operated by a Jewish businessman.The SS St. Louis
Prior to the German invasion of Poland and the subsequent beginning of World War II, many Jews tried to emigrate from Germany. In one such endeavor, approximately 900 Jews boarded the SS St. Louis, a German ship departing from Hamburg and heading to Cuba, in May, 1939. Arriving in the Havana Harbor, only 28 persons were allowed to disembark, even though the others had paid their fares and held visas that would permit them to enter the country.
The ship’s captain then sailed toward Florida, but was stopped by vessels of the United States Coast Guard. The captain and a committee of passengers requested help from the United States, but were denied. An appeal was made to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the captain was informed on June 5 that he would not be able to dock.
On June 6, the ship turned back to Europe. Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and England allowed entry to their countries, but within months, war was declared and much of western Europe was occupied by German troops. All who sailed, except for those allowed entry to England, were back in the hands of the very captors whom they had tried to escape.
The Kovno Ghetto
Jay Ipson and his family personally experienced life in the Kovno, Lithuania, Ghetto. As a young boy, he lived there with his parents and his maternal grandparents. The museum houses an
.jpg)
extremely realistic setting of a section of the ghetto, complete with armed guards and barbed wire fences.As the Jews entered the ghetto, they surrendered nearly all of their personal possessions. Confined like criminals, they had to wear the yellow Star of David. Any attempt to flee usually ended in being shot by one of the guards or soldiers. The dead were left on the streets as reminders of what could happen to those who broke the rules.
Hunger was a constant companion.
.jpg)
The weekly ration for an adult consisted of 2 ounces of salt, three ounces of grain, 4 ounces of flour, 4 ounces of meat, 2 slices of bread, and a handful of vegetables. The penalty for trying to smuggle food into the ghetto was death by shooting or public hanging. Everyone who visits the museum can see a replica of Mec, a teenage friend of the Ipsons, who was hanged for attempting to smuggle in a loaf of bread for his ill and starving mother. All residents of the ghetto were ordered out to watch the hanging.The following is taken from the museum guide book, “To See, To Feel, To Know: Experiencing the Holocaust through the Virginia Holocaust Museum.”
The Ipson family attended the Nieh Shul (New Synagogue). One day, the Nazis issued a command for the residents to take their pets to the synagogue. Their obedience was rewarded with the slaughter of these animals within the house of worship. The cruel vileness was two-fold: Nazis killed the pets loved by the families, and the blood from the animals rendered Nieh Shul unclean for worship. The fur from the pets was used for gloves and earmuffs for the German military, the meat was returned to the families as rations.”
Within the Kovno Ghetto was a place called Democratic Square. On October 28, 1941, 27,000 citizens of the ghetto were ordered to line up and march to the center of the square where SS Sergeant Helmut Rauca decided whether they would die that day, or be spared until a later time. As he calmly sat eating a sandwich, Sergeant Rauca ordered men to state their profession. With a flip of his riding crop, he would send them to the right or the left, depending on their answer. The men and their families dismissed to the left were usually well-educated professionals, for whom the Reich had no use. At the end of the day, 9,200 doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, musicians, and their family members were marched to the Ninth Fort, a center of genocide during WW II. The next morning, they were ordered to take off all their clothes and stand naked at the edge of a ditch. They were then shot in the back of the head and either fell or were thrown into the ditch and buried, some of them still alive.
Jay Ipson’s father, a lawyer, stood in the line before Sergeant Rauca. When his turn came, he told him that he was an auto mechanic. His and his family’s lives were spared that day, but the next morning he was ordered to fix an automobile, something he had never done. With luck and some borrowed tools, he managed to replace a broken U-joint on the vehicle. The Nazi who had ordered him to perform the work made him the shop foreman!
The Ipson’s Hiding Place
After managing to escape from the ghetto, the Ipsons contacted a farmer who was a friend of the family. When they asked for help, he allowed them to dig a hiding place between two large holes where potatoes were stored in the ground. For three weeks the family hid in the house while Jay’s father dug and constructed an underground hiding place between the potato holes. He fashioned tunnels leading from the hiding place to both potato holes, allowing them a way to get out if necessary.
For six months the family, now numbering thirteen, lived underground in a small “room” measuring 12 feet by 9 feet by 4 feet high. There was no light and not enough oxygen to keep a match or candle burning. The only oxygen they had was provided by a pipe that extended above ground to a dog kennel. They could not bather or change clothes during that time. Jay’s father and an uncle would risk leaving the hiding place under the cover of night to secure food from the farmer or to forage for something to eat. They had nothing but the hope that they could outlast the Nazi regime and someday return to some sort of normal life.
The museum exhibit replicates the hiding place very well.
We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through a dark tunnel to get to the “room,” where we were able to sit on the floor and see the 13 mannequins representing the family members. Only a dim red light was available…far more than the family had. We then exited by crawling through another tunnel to the other potato hole. It didn’t take long for a touch of fear and claustrophobia to set in. That someone actually lived in those circumstances for six months is beyond imagination. Something Greater Than Pity
Emerging from the tunnel, we entered the Hall of the Righteous, a beautiful tribute to those Gentiles who risked their lives (and those of their families) to provide assistance to Jews by hiding them, employing them in critical industries, feeding them, or helping them to escape. These people, considered to be among The Righteous of the Nations, risked everything rather than turn a blind eye to Hitler’s murderous policies. They counted the cost and concluded that a human life, even one officially called “worthless,” was worth protecting.
The world knows of the great humanitarian efforts of Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, but it will never be forgotten by the Jews that they received aid and comfort from thousands of others who reached out as humanitarians during the most inhumane period of modern history.
Death Of The Children
The world knows of the great humanitarian efforts of Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, but it will never be forgotten by the Jews that they received aid and comfort from thousands of others who reached out as humanitarians during the most inhumane period of modern history.
Death Of The Children
As we continued through the exhibit halls somber, almost speechless, and deep in thought, we felt we had seen the most hellish of the Holocaust nightmare in the concentration camps, the ripping apart of the families, the casual selection of those who would die and those who would continue the day-by-day torture, and the hideous and unimaginable deaths suffered by so many men and women under the policy of extinction. We were not prepared at all for shock and mind-numbing experience in the room of The Children’s Remembrance.
As we entered the room, we could hear a voice reading off the names of children who were family members of survivors who immigrated to the Richmond ar
ea; children who were cruelly murdered and disposed of as if they were nothing more than insects. One wall contained cards listing each of the names. Above the wall was written a number that staggered our imaginations almost beyond belief – 1,500,000 – the number of helpless children killed during the murderous campaign to obliterate the Jewish population of Western Europe.
“No age was safe from slaughter. Unborn babies were killed when the expectant mother was shot to death. Young mothers cradled their infants before bullets entered them both. The youngest children and those incapable of hard labor were killed, while older children awaited death in the ghettos and camps.” (To See, To Feel, To Know…)
The wall opposite the list of names was covered with pictures of the children, some already dead, others as walking dead with emaciated bodies and lifeless eyes – children who, if not killed
outright by the horrors they were living, would retain them in their memories for the rest of their lives.
And yet, in an almost cruel dichotomy, beneath the pictures of the dead and dying children were hand-scrawled letters and poems they had written and pictures they had drawn, demonstrating an almost indomitable spirit and the innocent belief in a better time to come. Small children, who experienced more horror, terror, and inhumanity in one or two years of their young lives than most adults could ever imagine, were still able to express hope for the future.
As we entered the room, we could hear a voice reading off the names of children who were family members of survivors who immigrated to the Richmond ar
ea; children who were cruelly murdered and disposed of as if they were nothing more than insects. One wall contained cards listing each of the names. Above the wall was written a number that staggered our imaginations almost beyond belief – 1,500,000 – the number of helpless children killed during the murderous campaign to obliterate the Jewish population of Western Europe.“No age was safe from slaughter. Unborn babies were killed when the expectant mother was shot to death. Young mothers cradled their infants before bullets entered them both. The youngest children and those incapable of hard labor were killed, while older children awaited death in the ghettos and camps.” (To See, To Feel, To Know…)
The wall opposite the list of names was covered with pictures of the children, some already dead, others as walking dead with emaciated bodies and lifeless eyes – children who, if not killed
outright by the horrors they were living, would retain them in their memories for the rest of their lives.And yet, in an almost cruel dichotomy, beneath the pictures of the dead and dying children were hand-scrawled letters and poems they had written and pictures they had drawn, demonstrating an almost indomitable spirit and the innocent belief in a better time to come. Small children, who experienced more horror, terror, and inhumanity in one or two years of their young lives than most adults could ever imagine, were still able to express hope for the future.
How to Answer the Jewish Question: The Final Solution
As we left The Children’s Remembrance, the voice reading names of dead children still sounding in our ears, we traversed down a darkened hallway and entered one end of another cattle car, symbolic of the railway system that was used to reduce people to the status of animals before leading them to the awaiting slaughter.
Walking out of the other end of the cattle car, we found ourselves facing a blank wall with a steel door – the entrance to one of the many gas chambers that were used to kill large groups of Jews at a single time. Stepping into the room we
experienced another bout of fear and claustrophobia; we were in a place with stark plaster walls (scratch marks embedded in them), no windows, a plain concrete floor, and a few shower heads above us – a room from which no prisoner left alive.
Over lunch at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Nazi leaders discussed and clarified the blueprint for The Final Solution. Experiments on the aged, infirm, and mentally ill had proven successful in mass genocide. Now it was time for them to move ahead with a program that would annihilate the Jewish population.
After being removed from their ghettos and placed on the rail cars, the Jews were transported to the death camps, many of which were located in Poland. For some, the living horror would continue as they were assigned the task of helping to kill and dispose of their fellow Jews – and sometimes their own family members.
For others, the end of their tortured lives was only steps away as they were formed into lines, marched to the doors of the squat, gray buildings, and told to strip off all their clothing so they could take a shower.
Once the “shower room” was stuffed full, the door was locked and the showers
began. But, instead of water, the shower was usually Zyklon B, a palletized combination of disinfectant, insecticide, and rat poison that, when melted by the rising temperatures of the room, released a cyanide-based gas.
As the reality of the situation struck them, the prisoners would scream for mercy, but would not receive it at the hands of the German soldiers and workers; it came only in the form of death after up to 30 minutes of suffering a hideous torture. Some clasped each other in an act of resignation in those final moments as others cried out and clawed futilely at the walls to seek a release that would come only as they took their final breath.
When the last prisoner was dead, the doors were opened and Jewish workers removed the bodies, shaved the heads, and searched the bodies for valuables. The items found by the work details were stored in warehouses. Hair would be bundled and sold to be made into socks for submariners, jaws were broken with crowbars in order to get to teeth and extract gold fillings. After being melted down, the gold was transferred to the Reichsbank; the victims were, in the eyes of their captors, worth more dead than alive.
When the work on the bodies was completed, they were hauled to the crematoriums for incineration, reduced to ashes. The crematoriums burned 24 hours a day with a fierce intensity. Survivors report that toward the end, when the Nazis realized that all was lost and tried to remove the traces of their activities, the furnaces burned so hot that not only smoke, but flames belched from the tops 
of the chimneys. Before the Allied troops could reach the death camps, more than three million Jews, half the total number killed during the Holocaust, were killed in the extermination camps.
Liberation and Beyond
On July 23, 1944, Russian troops liberated the Majdanek extermination camp. There they faced scenes of overpowering, unimaginable horrors committed by the Nazi regime. They asked for visiting Red Cross workers to take pictures to document the situ
ations, but even when the accounts and pictures were published, much of the world dismissed them as Russian propaganda used in retaliation for Hitler’s invasion of Russia. It was only after American and British troops liberated other camps and published similar documentation that the world finally came face-to-face with the reality and extent of the extermination procedures.
As we left The Children’s Remembrance, the voice reading names of dead children still sounding in our ears, we traversed down a darkened hallway and entered one end of another cattle car, symbolic of the railway system that was used to reduce people to the status of animals before leading them to the awaiting slaughter.
Walking out of the other end of the cattle car, we found ourselves facing a blank wall with a steel door – the entrance to one of the many gas chambers that were used to kill large groups of Jews at a single time. Stepping into the room we
experienced another bout of fear and claustrophobia; we were in a place with stark plaster walls (scratch marks embedded in them), no windows, a plain concrete floor, and a few shower heads above us – a room from which no prisoner left alive.Over lunch at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Nazi leaders discussed and clarified the blueprint for The Final Solution. Experiments on the aged, infirm, and mentally ill had proven successful in mass genocide. Now it was time for them to move ahead with a program that would annihilate the Jewish population.
After being removed from their ghettos and placed on the rail cars, the Jews were transported to the death camps, many of which were located in Poland. For some, the living horror would continue as they were assigned the task of helping to kill and dispose of their fellow Jews – and sometimes their own family members.
For others, the end of their tortured lives was only steps away as they were formed into lines, marched to the doors of the squat, gray buildings, and told to strip off all their clothing so they could take a shower.
Once the “shower room” was stuffed full, the door was locked and the showers
began. But, instead of water, the shower was usually Zyklon B, a palletized combination of disinfectant, insecticide, and rat poison that, when melted by the rising temperatures of the room, released a cyanide-based gas.As the reality of the situation struck them, the prisoners would scream for mercy, but would not receive it at the hands of the German soldiers and workers; it came only in the form of death after up to 30 minutes of suffering a hideous torture. Some clasped each other in an act of resignation in those final moments as others cried out and clawed futilely at the walls to seek a release that would come only as they took their final breath.
When the last prisoner was dead, the doors were opened and Jewish workers removed the bodies, shaved the heads, and searched the bodies for valuables. The items found by the work details were stored in warehouses. Hair would be bundled and sold to be made into socks for submariners, jaws were broken with crowbars in order to get to teeth and extract gold fillings. After being melted down, the gold was transferred to the Reichsbank; the victims were, in the eyes of their captors, worth more dead than alive.
When the work on the bodies was completed, they were hauled to the crematoriums for incineration, reduced to ashes. The crematoriums burned 24 hours a day with a fierce intensity. Survivors report that toward the end, when the Nazis realized that all was lost and tried to remove the traces of their activities, the furnaces burned so hot that not only smoke, but flames belched from the tops 
of the chimneys. Before the Allied troops could reach the death camps, more than three million Jews, half the total number killed during the Holocaust, were killed in the extermination camps.Liberation and Beyond
On July 23, 1944, Russian troops liberated the Majdanek extermination camp. There they faced scenes of overpowering, unimaginable horrors committed by the Nazi regime. They asked for visiting Red Cross workers to take pictures to document the situ
ations, but even when the accounts and pictures were published, much of the world dismissed them as Russian propaganda used in retaliation for Hitler’s invasion of Russia. It was only after American and British troops liberated other camps and published similar documentation that the world finally came face-to-face with the reality and extent of the extermination procedures. Several rooms in the museum document the 
liberation efforts and the long road that the Jews traveled before establishing their homeland, Israel, in 1948. Without homes or families, and facing severe anti-Semitism in the wake of World War II, many found them in displaced persons camps, sometimes the sites of the very concentration camps from which they had been liberated.
Exhibits told the stories of the displaced persons camps and the voyage
of the Haganah Ship (Exodus 1947) which attempted to transport 4,500 survivors to Palestine, but was prevented from doing so by vessels of the British Navy, the removal 
of Jews to camps in Cyprus, where they lived in summer tents and were surrounded by barbed wire, and their final journey to the new state of Israel, founded May 14, 1948.
A major exhibit, now under construction, will tell of the justice meted out as a result of the Nuremburg Trials, which held individual officers and leaders responsible for atrocities that had been committed in the name to the Third Reich. That room is expected to be opened to the public in September of this year, and will eventually have mannequins with a 95 % likeness of the individuals who served on the trial court.
The final exhibit in the building is The Survivor’s Room and the.jpg)
Tower of Remembrance, an open room in which photographs and letters are visible, readable proof of the lives and experiences of the Richmond survivors. Here, also, one hears the reading of names of loved ones lost by Richmond families. The ceiling above the Tower of Remembrance contains a 
stained glass window that depicts the flames of the Holocaust and Mt. Sinai. In Hebrew is the word,
liberation efforts and the long road that the Jews traveled before establishing their homeland, Israel, in 1948. Without homes or families, and facing severe anti-Semitism in the wake of World War II, many found them in displaced persons camps, sometimes the sites of the very concentration camps from which they had been liberated.Exhibits told the stories of the displaced persons camps and the voyage
of the Haganah Ship (Exodus 1947) which attempted to transport 4,500 survivors to Palestine, but was prevented from doing so by vessels of the British Navy, the removal 
of Jews to camps in Cyprus, where they lived in summer tents and were surrounded by barbed wire, and their final journey to the new state of Israel, founded May 14, 1948.A major exhibit, now under construction, will tell of the justice meted out as a result of the Nuremburg Trials, which held individual officers and leaders responsible for atrocities that had been committed in the name to the Third Reich. That room is expected to be opened to the public in September of this year, and will eventually have mannequins with a 95 % likeness of the individuals who served on the trial court.
The final exhibit in the building is The Survivor’s Room and the
.jpg)
Tower of Remembrance, an open room in which photographs and letters are visible, readable proof of the lives and experiences of the Richmond survivors. Here, also, one hears the reading of names of loved ones lost by Richmond families. The ceiling above the Tower of Remembrance contains a 
stained glass window that depicts the flames of the Holocaust and Mt. Sinai. In Hebrew is the word,“zachor” – Remember.
“These two spaces, The Survivor’s Room” and “The Tower of Remembrance”, keep close to home the losses sustained and the lives forever altered. They connect the past to the present and the dirt of Europe to the Virginia soil on which we stand. They connect those who survived with those who did not and those of us who experienced none of it with those who experienced the worst of it.” (To See, To Feel, To Know…)
Leaving the final exhibits, we walked quietly to the gift shop to look for some books that would help us remember what we had seen. The museum provided not only an insight into what had happened during those years prior to and during World War II, but also an intensely personal set of sensory experiences unlike anything we had ever seen or heard in a museum setting.
After purchasing a copy of ‘Izzy’s Fire,” the story of Jay Ispon’s family, we found that Jay, one of the co-founders of the museum, the little 8-year old boy who hid for 6 months in the small room between the potato cellars, was in the building at the time. One of the docents located him and asked if he would come to the counter to talk with us and autograph the book.
When he arrived, we found him eager to talk of his experiences and answer our questions about his family and their experiences and the funding and building of the museum. We spent several minutes visiting with him before he had to leave and take care of other duties. Jay, as far as we know, is the only Holocaust survivor we have ever met. He is living proof that with the right spirit, life is not about what happened to you, but about what you learned and how you react to those circumstances. With personal memories of the atrocities committed by man upon man, he looks toward the future with a vision to educate others so that his memories will not become realities visited upon future generations.
As we left the building, we once again entered the cattle car in front to have a moment of silence
and to light two candles in remembrance of those millions who lost their lives in the madness of the Holocaust, and in honor of those who survived and passed on their stories so that the world can never forget what happened.
“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, bec
ause I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t mentally ill.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.”
…Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892 – 1984), about the inactivity of the German intellectuals during the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their targets, group by group
In Richmond, June 14, 2007
Jim & Barbara
Leaving the final exhibits, we walked quietly to the gift shop to look for some books that would help us remember what we had seen. The museum provided not only an insight into what had happened during those years prior to and during World War II, but also an intensely personal set of sensory experiences unlike anything we had ever seen or heard in a museum setting.
After purchasing a copy of ‘Izzy’s Fire,” the story of Jay Ispon’s family, we found that Jay, one of the co-founders of the museum, the little 8-year old boy who hid for 6 months in the small room between the potato cellars, was in the building at the time. One of the docents located him and asked if he would come to the counter to talk with us and autograph the book.
When he arrived, we found him eager to talk of his experiences and answer our questions about his family and their experiences and the funding and building of the museum. We spent several minutes visiting with him before he had to leave and take care of other duties. Jay, as far as we know, is the only Holocaust survivor we have ever met. He is living proof that with the right spirit, life is not about what happened to you, but about what you learned and how you react to those circumstances. With personal memories of the atrocities committed by man upon man, he looks toward the future with a vision to educate others so that his memories will not become realities visited upon future generations.
As we left the building, we once again entered the cattle car in front to have a moment of silence
and to light two candles in remembrance of those millions who lost their lives in the madness of the Holocaust, and in honor of those who survived and passed on their stories so that the world can never forget what happened.“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, bec
ause I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t mentally ill.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.”
…Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892 – 1984), about the inactivity of the German intellectuals during the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their targets, group by group
In Richmond, June 14, 2007
Jim & Barbara
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