Off campus event

For my off-campus event I’d like to consider my trip to the Holocaust museum in Houston during this past semester. First, however, a brief account of my experience with the subject is needed. Being Jewish, I have had much interaction with the subject of the Holocaust. I have read books about it. I have seen films about it. I have completed school art projects on it. I have been to numerous Holocaust museums all over the world and told that I specifically have a responsibility to know and remember what happened. Whether it was in D.C., L.A., or even Jerusalem, the museums were all very moving. We listened to survivors speak at many of them. The thing is, however, these always ended the same way. Of course it was all moving at the time, but, to borrow a line from the film Hotel Rwanda, essentially I just went on eating my dinner. Most often, I was troubled for the rest of the day and then I forgot about it and went on living my life. This past summer, I went to Berlin and visited the concentration camp “Sachsenhausen” with my dad. The camp was mostly turned into a museum and still had many structures standing, including the ovens used to turn dead bodies into ash (much easier to deal with). The end result was fundamentally different from any time after I had seen any of the other museums. I had been where it had happened. Seen that it HAD happened.
It is with this background, therefore, that I went to the Holocaust museum in Houston. I went fully expecting the same experience as I’ve had at every other museum I’ve been to, but, to my surprise, it was different. Put simply, it had a huge impact on me. Suddenly, those people in the pictures could have been killed five feet from where I once stood. Someone… a life… could have frozen to death in the striped uniform on the wall. There was a direct connection between what I had seen in Germany and what I was looking at on the wall. I’m not sure how else to say it, other than, this mattered to me. I didn’t forget what I saw. I took it to memory, thought about it, even wrote about it some in my journal. I thought about religion, belief versus action, life, and what it means to be a fellow human being. All things which I have thought of before, but never in such a dark context and never like this. Perhaps it’s because I’m questioning my religion right now, and yet would certainly have been identified in Nazi Germany as Jewish, whether I liked it or not. It made me realize that who you are is, on some level, inevitable from birth.
Most of all, however, this experience it provided me with the distinction of experienced knowledge versus what can be called “fed knowledge.” “Fed knowledge” is just like it sounds. Facts you retain because they’ve been told to you, in this case, a lot. For me, going to a Jewish school all my life, the epitome of “fed knowledge” is the Holocaust. This is for good reason. The Holocaust was a representation of evil on a scale that has been seemingly unmatched in all human history. Everyone should know that it happened and not allow it to happen again because it was very wrong, very recent, and it would be very bad if it happened again. That being said, I think the only way to really get what happened and why it matters is to go there and see it with your own eyes. In the end, it reinforced my belief that experienced knowledge is more powerful than any fact that is told to you, and as such, should be held at a higher value.