imperial war museum

Today I met my class at the Imperial War Museum south of the river. The building actually used to be the mental hospital Bedlam, after it moved out of central London. ("Bedlam" comes from Bethlehem - It was the Hospital of Bethlehem, but became shortened over time.)

In the entrance to the museum was a piece of warped metal, about three times my height. It meant nothing to me until my professor mentioned it might have some importance to people from New York. It was a piece of the World Trade Centers. I immediately got chills over my entire body that stayed with me throughout my visit, despite being in a heated building.

In the main atrium sits a German bomb that was used during the Blitz on London. It stood four stories tall. I cannot even imagine the terror of knowing these were falling from the sky, in areas that I walk through every day.

We were assigned a creative writing project: to write a series of war letters from any conflict zone in the world, past or present. I'm kind of excited to start that. We were supposed to walk around the museum and find information to use in our letters.

I got a bit distracted. I spent all of my time in the Holocaust Museum, an exhibition inside the Imperial War Museum. I have never felt more immersed, more moved, more provoked and more disgusted than I did in that exhibit. The exhibit was extremely comprehensive, very personal, and provided so much to read and look at that is so often lost in the horror of it all.

I was most moved by a letter scribbled on cardboard en route on train to Auschwitz, a husband to his wife. I didn't realize I was crying until I couldn't read the words anymore. The strength it must have taken that man, to choose the words he would want his wife to read, to not mention death or horror, to talk of love and life. And I was privileged enough to read those words, in his handwriting.

The exhibit had an actual exam table they used to euthenize sick children. It had a canister of Zyklon B. There was a model of Auschwitz. There were biographies of Nazi doctors - what they were before they became monsters. There were samples of colored hair that Nazi scientists used to identify true Aryans. There were star patches and striped uniforms. And throughout it all the museum had found stories of individuals - German, Polish, Ukranian, Catholic, Jewish, black, white - who lived (and died) in that time. It granted so much more perspective to read about the twelve year old Catholic girl who would sneak into the Warsaw ghetto to play with her Jewish friend, and got caught.

They had so many pictures. Reality is made is so unavoidable.

There were rooms and rooms of information about the history leading up to the Nazi regime, which gave me a harrowing idea of how it could have happened. How it might have snuck up on the unsuspecting.

I have read books, seen documentaries, visited other Holocaust museums, but I have never been affected by the enormity of it all until today.