February 20, 2012

Monday 20~~~~We have been in Fullerton, California since Friday and today we drove to Los Angeles to tour the "Museum of Tolerance". It is a museum about the "Holocaust" with room after room telling the whole story of the capturing of the Jew's and what all they went through for survival and of course the story of the millions who were executed. Everyone at the beginning of the tour was given a card that you put into the computers that were all over the museum and it showed you what Jewish child you were. There were different check points to update your card to tell you more about yourself. At the end of the tour, the computer printed your picture and all about your family and where your lived and what your father did and where you were taken after the Germans came and what happened to you. Each child was an actual case of that person. It is a reminder of how thankful we can be to live in a free country with all our choices of freedom we have. There were conference rooms with lots of seating, to go and listen to the volunteer Holocaust survivors who are quite old now, tell the story of their lives from childhood to present date. They told what their lives were like before the Germans took over, some very prosperous wealthy families owning their own business and leading very happy normal lives. Most of them lost their families, you had to be strong and healthy to survive. The elderly, sick, frail and weak were sent to the gas chambers, they sent the children through the gas chambers with their grand parents, leaving the parents to be workers. First they shaved the woman's heads and they bundled all the hair into bales, like bales of hay and they shipped it to another place to be made into blankets for the German soldiers. The parents if they were healthy were kept to be workers until they become too weak to be any good to the Germans and then they to were executed. Men and women were separated from each other, they slept 8 to a bed made out of wood with no mattress and one blanket for the 8 of them to share. The poor guy on the edge was really in the cold. They slept four at each end and they had 16 inches of bed space each. Their body heat from being so close is probably what kept them warm in the freezing winters. We received our picture and story of our child at the end of the tour and both of ours died in the gas chambers with their grand mother. They were such beautiful children in the pictures they gave us.