U.S. Holocaust Museum

The United States Holocaust Museum is a somber memorial to the lives changed and lost as a result of the Nazi extermination of Jews in the mid-20th century. Through pictures, videos and artifacts, the museum reminds us of the tragedy that was the Holocaust while urging us to never let anything like it happen again.

Most of the museum is designed to look like a Nazi Concentration Camp where millions of Jews were killed in Europe. This is the beginning of the tour, an elevator to the 4th floor.

The crowd at the museum was surprising large for a Friday morning

A “Gypsy” wagon from one of the areas in Europe where the Nazis relocated a whole people group for their convenience and ideology.

Torah fragments from European Synagogues that the Nazis desecrated

The “ark” from the Synagogue in Nentershausen, German. The inscription that the Nazis desecrated on the “Night of Broken Glass” reads “Know Before Whom You Stand.”

This tree stump served as a grave marker where the Nazis executed over 1700 Jews near the town of Palmiry in Poland.

A bed from the Sachsenberg clinic where children were killed by starvation, lethal injections, or overdoses of medicine mixed in with their food.

An uncut section of material from Belgium from which the Star of David would be cut for Jews to wear to identify themselves as Jews.

A section about Anne Frank, a well-known Dutch Jew who, with her family, hid for a time from the Nazis before finally being caught and sent to a concentration camp

A milk can where some Jews hid and buried the Oneg Shabbat Archive in Warsaw

Work implements found after the war on the site of the former ghetto in Lodz, Poland

The main door from the Wolff Hospital in Lodz, Poland

The gate of the Jewish cemetery in Tarnow, Poland, where the Nazis killed between 5,000 and 10,000 Jews in a few days in June in 1942.

“Work Sets You Free,” a German phrase known to have appeared at concentration camps including Auschwitz

Restored bunks from Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp is an example of the degrading conditions Jews had to endure.

“We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses. We are shes from grandchildren and grandfathers from Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam, and because we are only made of fabric and leather and not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.” -Yiddish Poet, Moses Schulstein (1911-1981)

A special table used to remove gold from corpses

An example of the crematoria used to dispose of the bodies of Jews killed by the Nazis in the concentration camps

A Danish rescue boat used to rescue Jews from Germany to the Swedish coast

The concentration camp uniform cap and blanket wore by Berl Miklin following his escape from the SS, remaining in hiding until Soviet troops liberated the area near Stutthof

Hundreds of photos from one town in Europe of a Jewish community that was nearly wiped out serves as a reminder of the human toll of the Holocaust

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