Holocaust Memorial Museum Visit

Words: 544
Pages: 3

My family is not Jewish, nor are we descended from politicians. None of my ancestors were prisoners of war or openly homosexual, nor did they fight in Europe during the 1940s. So maybe I can not talk about the Holocaust as a fifteen year old high school student and argue for all of those in killed the concentration camps to be remembered, and yet I want to do so anyways. Last summer, during a week long vacation to Washington D.C., my family visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This visit was made at my request, as I have always been fascinated with the World War Two era and have spent a decent amount of time learning as much as I possibly can about it. While we were in the museum, there must have been hundreds of other visitors …show more content…
Blue triangles were used for emigrants, green for criminals, red for political enemies, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for asocials, pink for homosexuals, and yellow for Jews. Poles and Czechs had black letters on red triangles; members of the armed forces had their red triangles inverted. Special prisoners had brown armbands in addition to their triangle. Some people had circular markings indicating that they had tried to escape. Each one of them had a number pinned above the triangle mark, a number that told those who ran the camps who they were. Prior to seeing that chart, seeing the photos of the many people, I was not fully aware of the many different types of people in the concentration camps. I was disappointed in myself for not knowing that it was not six million Jews that died in the camps as I previously thought, but rather six million people. There were roughly three or four hundred photographs on the wall. It was powerful, seeing displayed in front of me how many different people were trapped and slaughtered in the camps, yet it was a miniscule sample of the six million people that died and the uncounted number of people that were imprisoned and eventually rescued by the Allied