My Extraordinary Visit to the Museum of Tolerance:
The Disappearance of a family during the Holocaust
(A Story Dedicated to the Memory of Reva Gabe)

Mya L. Benson

I took a trip to “The Museum of Tolerance” a little while ago. It was like taking a tour through the past while gaining more knowledge in depth about the events in history. It was a very intriguing and emotional experience. Upon going through the first entrance downstairs, the tour guide told my group that, "history has a chance of repeating itself, if we don’t remember". I didn’t completely understand what he meant by that. Then we listened to the video master, and proceeded to pick the next door that we would enter. One door was marked, "prejudiced" and the other door was marked, "non-prejudice". At that point the tour guide let us know that the door marked "non-prejudice" was locked for a reason. That reason is that everyone has judged another person or has held prejudice towards another human being, so that is why we must enter into the prejudice door, which consisted of hate remarks that are thrown around in the air, and the new ways that racist people are targeting others to hate in a more advanced, new way of getting their messages across.

One of the things that I liked most about the museum is that we got to pick out a card with a picture of a Jewish child on it. The child I chose was Reva Gabe, and as we proceeded we would learn more about what happened to that child. After picking out a child, we entered into the Holocaust exhibit, which to me was absolutely impressive. I especially liked the part when they had the re-creation of a popular street café in Berlin in the 1930’s. We heard the conversations of the people there and what happened to them afterwards. I found it to be depressing but yet mystifying in a sense. If only these people knew just how powerful Hitler was becoming, their lives would have turned out better. I learned so much more about Hitler than I knew before. Some of the things that I learned were how he gained favor among the Germans by putting the blame on the Jews for Germany losing the war. I learned how Hitler had mapped out the different races, describing them, from the best (Anglo-American, German, British, etc…) to the worst (Blacks, Jews, Asians, etc…) on his list, according to him. I also learned about how the Germans had burned up the books of famous/excellent Jewish writers from Sigmund Freud on down while simultaneously making the cities more modern with fashionable clothing, new styles, comic books about the hatred of Jews, and how the children in school were being brainwashed into hating the Jews.

I literally cried when I would see on the video screens the treatment of the Jews. I wouldn’t even treat an animal the same way that mankind was treated in Germany at that time. The people were so caught up in the racism and the hatred that had spilled over onto them from Hitler that they weren’t even in the reality of what was going on. The only way that they could possibly understand it is if they were standing on the outside and looking in on this horrific event that they would realize just how evil they were towards the human race. In the midst of this event the Jewish people were disintegrating. They were being degraded, experimented upon, and some of the families would actually disappear off the face of the Earth like Reva and her family. Walking through the concentration camp gates was like meeting death, never to walk out alive again.

At this point, or another, I saw how the Germans had mapped out the locations of the places that they would evacuate the Jews. A small town named Kovel, located in Poland, was a prominent Jewish town. When the Germans invaded it, all of the Jewish people were evacuated and their business was shut down. This is the town where Reva lived. Some of the Jews had tried to immigrate to other countries that didn’t want any part of this tumultuous trauma. So the Jews had to turn around and eventually die with disappointment and no more hopes of being free.

Before entering this museum, I knew that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews, but this was an experience that opened my eyes, gave me more knowledge of what happened in this event, and gave me chills through my skin. Now I understand what the tour guide meant when he said, "history has a chance of repeating itself, if we don’t remember". Even though I wasn’t in this world at that time, it’s important that I know what happened before I was born so that I am one less ignorant person to persuade into this hatred and racism.

This experience touched me, and I am proud to say that, ‘I remember’.