The Last Few Days

We were happily joined by Loretta two days ago, and headed out to see some D.C. sights. Right off the subway at the Mall, we saw a farmers' market, but not just any farmers' market:


We looked at the sparse offerings wilting in the midday heat and headed on to the National Gallery of Art. After some of the recent museums we've seen, it was a little bit underwhelming, but there were certainly some highlights. A few things by this guy:


A lovely woman smelling a rose in a courtyard:


and a few other things I really liked seeing, especially and surprisingly a few Vermeers. Have I ever mentioned that I heart Vermeer? Anyway, I do, and I was glad to see this:


We traipsed around a bit more, (as much as one can traipse in weather that feels more like wading through pea soup than walking), and finished our day with pizza, cold beer, and a few games of pool at a local dive-y bar. (We were going to catch an evening of jazz back at the Mall or a classical concert in Rock Creek Park, but we couldn't get it together to make it to either in time, whereas pool at the bar had no set start time, you see how it is...)

Yesterday the big and only thing on the agenda was the United States Holocaust Museum, basically the whole reason I wanted to come to Washington D.C. on this trip. I've been thinking about what I want to say about it since we left. It is simply the most well thought-out museum/memorial experience I have ever, ever seen. Rather than explain more about it, here are a few things that have stuck in my mind.

* The shoes. We've all seen pictures of the piles of shoes left by gas chamber victims. But seeing even a smallish pile of those old, dusty leather shoes was moving even when I knew it was coming.

* The Tower of Faces. You start at the museum's 4th floor and descend slowly back to the ground. Up on one of the higher floors, you go through a walkway that has hundreds of photos from a shtetl, a Jewish settlement in Lithuania, taken by amateur photographers that lived there. Serious wedding day portraits are intermingled with laughing groups of friends on holiday - one photograph of a young family shows mom with baby, dad holding a teddy bear, and you can even see grandma's hand in the frame shaking a toy at the little one to get him to smile. The first time you go through the photos you just learn about the settlement and look at as many as you can see. Two floors down you walk through again, and learn that a mobile SS death sqaud shot and killed all of them in the course of two days. 900 years of continuous Jewish settlement in that town, and in two days in September, 1941, all dead. No Jews now live in that town.

*The voices. One of the things that the museum does best is constantly move from macro to micro. Just when you're on information overload and you start to wonder how anyone might actually have lived through this or that particular horror, you come upon an exhibit of survivor's voices, or a theater where you can see people telling small stories of their experience. I will close with one small story...an older woman begins, talking about the first few minutes at camp. The shouting, the bewilderment...and one SS woman guard in particular, barking at them like a bulldog, she'd never heard a human voice that could sound like that. Then, the survivor pauses, and starts talking about how decent, kind, and good that SS woman was, that over the next months at camp she became her savior. It's an astonishing thing to listen to, the complete change in her voice as she talks. She describes one day when a higher-up SS man came to inspect their camp, and she was sick in her bunk with two other girls. This SS woman came, forced her to get up, tied their shoes and set them at their workstations, telling them to "get themselves together - today, it's a matter of life or death." The survivor closes her story by saying that this woman's example "pins a lie to the lips of anyone else who says that they had no choice".