(By: Taylor Schultz)
Address: 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington D.C., 20024
Hours: 10:00am - 5:20pm daily
Cost: Free
Contact Number: (202) 488-0400
Website: www.ushmm.org
One place that I am researching for our trip to Washington D.C., is the Holocaust Museum. I’ve been really interested in it ever since I started to learn about it in school in the eighth grade. For Christmas this year, my dad bought me a book written by Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust survivor. I’m really anxious to learn about her story.
In 1978 President Carter thought of the idea to make a holocaust museum to honor the victims and the survivors at that time, and to educate the United States more about what happened.
The Holocaust is the state-sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims -- six million were murdered; Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.
The Holocaust Museum has been visited by 30 million people, including more than 9 million school children and 85 heads of state. It was designed by James Ingo Freed, and built by the Blake Construction Company. The construction took almost four years, and cost approximately $168 million to build.
In addition to the various memorials and artifacts inside the museum, I learned about something called the Children’s tile wall. There is a tile for each of the 1.5 million children that were killed. I know it will be difficult to see, but I feel like it’s important.
I’m really looking forward to our trip, and especially walking through the Holocaust Museum.
You could literally spend all day in this museum (well, most of them, actually). We spent about 4 hours and really went through pretty quickly. I cannot tell you how heavy my heart was within the walls of this museum. And the room with the shoes... it's no small room. You will be broken. But, it's a MUST in DC.
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