Today, I took a vacation day from work to spend with nsshere. Our mission: Visit the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles. This museum is an adjunct of the Simon Wisenthal Center.
We spent most of the time visiting two exhibits. The first was their exhibit on the Holocaust, which took us along a guided presentation from the situation in Germany in the mid-1920s up and through the liberation of the concentration camps. They made the activity more personal by giving us a card with the name of a child as we entered, and we followed the life of the child midway through the war, to what happened to them. My child was Eduard Hornemann, born in 1932 in Eindhover, Holland. Alas, even though his father was an official with Phillips Corporation, he didn’t make it… in the fall of 1944 he was sent to a camp where they experimented with children, and he was infected on purpose with tuberculosis, dying in 1945 when the British were less than three miles from the camp.
One of the things the exhibit emphasized was how ordinary people were swept up in the racism, and how bit by bit unspeakable things were done under government direction. This led quite well into the other main exhibit, which focused on Tolerance and Intolerance. There it was emphasized on how one person can make a different. How we can take responsibility for ourselves, how can we can work to make a more tolerant society. In some ways, it is sad that so much intolerance and racial hatred is still out in the world (and certainly all over the internet). It’s a hard subject to convey, and they Museum seemed to convey it well (especially as their focus is children–during the school year, they have over 700 students a day go through).
After those two exhibits, we had a quick lunch. We briefly expored the two other exhibits that were open. One was on family history. This was interesting in that last year at this time we were in Nashville at a family reunion for a branch of the family that came over in the 1850s. We did have family on my side that escaped from White Russia, but in the early 1900s, through China and then San Francisco to New York. That tied well to the other special exhibit: a photo exhibit on the Jews of China. One thing I learned there was the large number of Jews that China saved during the holocaust.
In any case, it was a fascinating day, marred only by a headache in the morning. It was nice to spend the day with my daughter. I have a lot of interest in this area, having taken classes in Antisemitism when I was an undergraduate at UCLA in the 1980s (from Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, historyontrial, now one of the foremost fighter of Holocaust Denial).
