Yad Vashem, Jerusalem: the chill of the Holocaust
[tab:Travel]
The visit to Yad Vashem, three times in the holy Jerusalem, is a frightening descent into the dungeons of humanity, a tour of the terrible Holocaust anatomy. There is a museum, in, is a knock on the conscience that leaves you stunned morally. And the worst, the terrifying suspicion that if you repeat something similar again maybe we would not do anything about it. In Rwanda and Kosovo, I refer.
The visitor took the first steps by Yad Vashem, the mole impresionte arrow-shaped cleft in the wooded mountains surround Jerusalem, afflicted with heart. It is inevitable that a figure ronde head while lined up the center aisle. Six million Jews exterminated during the Holocaust. But the first rooms you do not plunge into barbarism and irrationality of Nazism, but in the normality of Jewish life before the Holocaust. A routine that makes even more incomprehensible things to come and reminds us that a peaceful society should never let your guard down. The Jewish world to crumble necessary to consider any prejudice released. How can the society of the time unmoved attend the witch hunt launched against the Jews by the Nazi regime? Were stripped of their citizenship and reduced to mere outcasts before forcing them to retreat into ghettos, as if they were lepers, pending the final solution.
You keep moving forward jolted by a growing anxiety and stunned it impossible to understand such madness
The center aisle is strewn with obstacles that require walking through the different rooms, a chronological journey with a final one known to be approaching with regret. The different stages to the extermination of the concentration camps are profusely documented, so that one continues to advance shaken by a growing anxiety and stunned by the inability to understand such madness.
In the larger room, dedicated to the final solution, is difficult to temper the grief, especially when you have a wagon train front, transected, as those used to transport Jews to extermination camps. A little later, tens of stories of survivors of Auschwitz add a little more than grief visitors. Silence is sidereal. No murmur. People remain preoccupied with the posters with the testimonies of Jews who escaped from hell, with photographs of the bodies of prominent bone, spectra before men, with all imaginable despair and resignation in his eyes sad.
It is a painful ordeal, but necessary to remember, to swear not to allow something like that one day could be repeated. A visit, and say, must for ever silence the voice of suffering, to be aware that, anytime, man can return to being a wolf to man, making good the maxim of Hobbes.
Visit more shocking is that of Children's Memorial, an enduring tribute to and a half million child victims of the Holocaust
The tour ends in the Hall of Names, a dome of ten meters tall variegated 600 photographs of Holocaust victims, a constantly updated listing through the arduous task of guiding research at Yad Vashem. At the end of the hall project their heartbreaking testimonies. Some do not forget. "Remember only that I was innocent, just like you, mortal that day; I, also, had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy, Simply a human face!”, he wrote Benjamin Fondane, murdered in Auschwitz 1944. Little more can be added.
Outside the campus, must approach the Memorial to the Deportees, an original German freight car suspended in the void on some roads that lead nowhere, a metaphor for the terrible fate of the millions of Jews transported like cattle to the killing fields. And next to the entrance of the museum is the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, where it has planted a tree for every non-Jewish citizens who risked his life to avoid barbarism. Among the lush forest is a plaque that reminds Oskar Schindler, famous by the Oscar winning film "Schindler's List".
But, certainly, Most striking is the visit of the Children's Memorial, an enduring tribute to and a half million child victims of the Holocaust. Inside the underground grotto, walk in the shadows while the page is heard a painful litany: Names, age and country of origin of all these innocent victims look. That look of children is based on a poignant question that will explode in the face. Why?
[tab:the way]
There are several airlines that fly directly from Madrid to Jerusalem.
[tab:highly recommended]
Spend all morning to visit Yad Vashem. Not a museum to visit in a hurry. Take your time. The enclave, also, is spectacular and worth a walk in the woods, which offers a magnificent view of Jerusalem.
Yad Vashem is closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. For any query: www.yadvashem.org.
It is close to its impressive library: 62 million pages, 267.500 mi9les photographs and testimonies of Holocaust survivors who may be consulted by the public without restriction.
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