Yad Vashem thoughts

Today after touring the Old City we visited Yad Vashem which is Israel’s national Holocaust memorial. This is not just a museum but a vast complex. I just have several quick thoughts about today’s visit and a comparison to the US Holocaust museum which I have visited many times on class trips. First and foremost Yad Vashem is an amazingly well done documentation of the horrific events of the Holocaust. I found there to be many more pictures which helped to tell the story in a much more complete way. What I found particularly disturbing today was the fact that this memorial brought out the fact in much better clarity the amount of children that were killed in this event. I don’t remember this impression from my visits to the US museum. The fact that 1.5 million children were killed is something that I had not realized before. In one village they took all the children under the age of 10 away and just killed them. We visited the children’s memorial which was also very powerful. There was also a traveling exhibit about the children of the Holocaust which had memorabilia of various children from different countries. This was my troubling take away for today. An event such as this should never happen again.