The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: One has to see it to believe the extent of the horror and the suffering inflicted during the Nazi period. The museum contains exhibits and documentary footage, which not only chilled my spine but also brought me to tears. It was heart-wrenching to see footage of the mass graves where bodies upon bodies upon bodies - skin and bones - were stacked onto one another. Such a damning indictment as well of political apathy in Germany and also in other countries which could have stepped in earlier but turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to reports coming out of Germany.
In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
- A poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller
Where they burn books, they will end up burning human beings, too.
- German poet Heinrich Heine
"We are the shoes, We are the last witnesses
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire"
- Moses Schulstein, Yiddish poet
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