Yad Vashem - Israeli Holocaust Museum

We were free on Monday afternoon so we took a taxi to Yad Vashem. The memorial sits on a 60+ acre campus, beautifully wooded and landscaped. Surrounding the outside of the memorial is a walk of memory, honoring gentiles who helped save lives of Jews during WWII. The rooms of the memorial contained photographs, written accounts, and visual displays including interviews with holocaust survivors. The memorial was organized as a history of the holocaust, showing events that led up to the war, the rise of hitler and the Nazi party in Germany, and the development of laws that took away rights of Jewish citizens in Germany and the countries it occupied. As a Dutch woman said, it was like the Nazi's threw the people a loop of rope around the Jews and it gradually became tighter and tighter until a whole people was being murdered. It was deeply moving and troubling, leaving us in tears at some of the stories.

We saw a name we knew in the walk of the righteous, and I was moved by remembering the sacrifice this person made to save the life of a young Jewish boy in Rotterdam. Trudy left a stone on the traintrack of an exhibit of a boxcar used to transport Jews to the prison camps (leaving a stone on a grave is like leaving flowers in our culture) and we walked away in tears at the enormity of what had happened less than a century ago.