The Holocaust Museum in Washington D C, opened in 1993, serves both as a memorial and a museum. It is a simple building that contains the results of extensive research and documentation concerning a particular era in the history from which lessons can be learnt by people all over the world.

It documents in three sections – the Nazi rise to power, the period of Nazi rule and the immediate aftermath – through an extraordinary collection of photographs and films. It also plays witness to the systematic persecution of six million Jews and others including gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, Jehova’s witnesses and the handicapped in the hands of Hitler and his men.

The exhibit for children is called ‘Daniel’s Story’. It is about an eight-year-old Jewish boy who lived in Germany at that time. It documents in an understated manner, the changes that he witnesses in the world around him, his incomprehensibility at what is happening and the utter cruelty of his separation from his mother and sister.

Upon entry into the museum, each person is given an identity card with the name and history of a holocaust victim. Mine was a Polish girl called Adela Low, who died at the age of 20 when she was betrayed, shot and dumped into a mass grave with her mother and her brother. The identity card made the whole experience more real, and brought us closer to the victims.

The permanent exhibits on the third and a part of the second floor give graphic details of the transition of Germany under Hitler through photographs. It is corroborated with video footages and taped testimonies of survivors. The video screens are behind ‘shields’ and can be avoided if you are accompanied by children. Even for grown-ups, certain footages are hard to digest.

The exhibit that touched me the most was the thousands of shoes worn by the victims. There are vivid pictures of children, who were victims of the notorious Dr Mengele’s experiments, of  forced marches, starved prisoners in the concentration camps, of Kristallnacht, of Jewish women who consorted with Germans of non-Jewish descent being paraded and jeered at – the list is endless. There is the picture of the boxcar in which thousands were transported to concentration camps. The boxcar has just one small window up above and the victims had to live in it with no proper air, food and just the stench of decaying bodies and minds.

I spent time on the Wall of Remembrance which is composed of more than 3000 colourful tiles painted by American children, dedicated to the memory of nearly 1.5 million children who were murdered during the holocaust. The tiles held such messages as – ‘This should never have happened’ or simply ‘I feel sad’.

The Museum honours the resistance fighters, the ordinary people who secretly helped Jews and gypsies to escape by hiding them at the risk of their own lives. And people like Raoul Wallenberg who disappeared after helping tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing them Swedish passports.

The museum has a Hall of Remembrance with a bright flame flickering in the northern part of the room and also a meditation room to reflect on what one has seen, to experience ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.

In his book ‘Night’, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Weisel talks of his reasons for writing it: “The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”