Yad Vashem

I’ve been to several Jewish museums and Holocaust museums throughout the world. But Yad Vashem, the large holocaust museum in Jerusalem is like no other. Architecturally, it’s impressive and it is situated in a large expansive park setting. It’s also on a scale that is large.

It’s the first museum I’ve been to were people are openly crying, and I found myself shaken and at the edge of tears myself a couple of times. The numerous video-taped recollections of survivors of the death camps and the mass murder sites are so gripping that you can’t believe the people telling the tales (all children at the time) were able to speak about it. Details like how women at one camp were led to the edges of the pits in groups of 10, ordered to disrobe and pile their clothing in a certain place, how they would stand and what direction they would face… And that there were people who survived all that and could describe everything that happened while people were killed by the thousands. Survivors of such a thing must have held two ideas in tension through the rest of their lives: (1) no merciful god would allow such a thing; and (2) divine miracles absolutely must exist.

I’ve never seen the actual workings of the killing pits and the concentration camps described in detail before. The sculpted scale models at Yad Vashem show particular camps with architectural style details and are filled with people actually moving through the gas chambers that show what happened to them during and after they were killed. These are still stuck in my mind.

David Olère, a survivor who had somehow made many works of art while working in a death camp (and afterwards, too.). His original drawing, "David Olère Burying the Remains of Children" was a particularly gruesome and arresting image. I felt compelled to make a sketch of it while standing in front of it.