Family stories deepen experience at Holocaust museum

We all grow up hearing certain stories again and again. One of mine comes when the old brown picture album comes out, and my mom notices my sister or me staring intently at the pictures of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The pictures show a frenzy of people, an air of ceremony and a smattering of swastikas. \n"Grandma Rose was there," my mom would say. "She was 17, and she went with her friends. She saw when Jesse Owens won the relay, and looked back from where she sat, 10 rows below Hitler, to see how furious he was that a black man won the event. \n"And when everyone had stood at the beginning of the ceremony to say 'Heil Hitler,' Grandma Rose and her friends remained seated," Mom told us.\n"Wow, Grandma Rose was brave," we'd marvel. \n"No, she was just young and stupid; she could have been killed," my mom would tell us.\nMy grandmother was a German Jew, and she left Germany a year later, never to see her parents or the other beaming people in the photo album again. \nThis story echoed in my head as I stood in the cold, waiting to enter the Holocaust museum in Washington Friday. I was prepared for what I was about to see, but it didn't soften the impact. \nI saw the calipers the Nazis used to measure the width of people's heads and noses to judge if they were Aryans or Jews. I saw a photo of a magnificent synagogue built to the scale of a cathedral. The photos show it first in all its opulence, second after the Nazis looted it. I can't imagine a force great enough to destroy the ceiling, much less the hate behind it. \nThen, leering from posters, the Nazi propaganda tactics. The way the Nazis used simple, emotional, repetitive creeds to alter reality for their followers. The propaganda is a proven format: take three colors, maybe three letters or even a racial slur to rally people into thinking killing is noble.\nPropaganda is based on the assumption that people don't want to think independently, see the shades of gray and come to a decision. It only comes in black or white. \nThe beauty of the museum reminded me of the scene in "Schindler's List," a black and white movie, when a little girl in a red dress darts across the screen. In the Holocaust museum, the girl in the red dress was in the drawings by young Jewish children -- the red lipstick on the sun, the smoke curling from the chimney and the purple used to shade the side of a mountain. Under the construction paper were signs with the children's names listed, followed by the date they were taken to Auschwitz. \nThe girl in the red dress probably wore shoes like the ones that fill a room in the museum -- shoes discarded before their owners went to the gas chamber. \nThe acrid rubber smell of the shoes and the amusing charm in the drawings are the stunningly bitter and beautiful details that drive the tragedy home. They make me wonder how, just 60 years ago, 6 million people could have fallen victim to such simple, black hate. It was a hate that left no room for red dresses or flamboyant suns. \nThe museum brings those to our attention, as well as the stories of hundreds of survivors accessible from computers on the first floor of the museum. \nI've always taken pride in my grandmother's bravery. I've winced thinking of her absorbing the news she would go to America alone, hearing the echo of the Gestapo banging on her parents' door before it came. \nSeeing the museum deepened my revulsion of simplistic hatred, and reading the quote at the end of the guided tour brought the old brown photo album into a broader perspective. \n"Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children." Deuteronomy 4:9