I took my Jewish boyfriend to the Holocaust museum for the first time.
By Ariana Barrett
Hayes in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Last spring, on the way to my boyfriend Hayes’ lacrosse game in Richmond, we drove past the Holocaust museum. I mentioned in passing that I had been there once as a kid and have always wanted to go back as an adult, and he mentioned he had never been. He hadn’t even been to the one in D.C., he said, which was surprising to me since he had grown up in its surrounding suburbs. It was even more shocking to me because Hayes is Jewish and deeply connected with his culture.
He said he had planned to go with his class once in middle school but was late and wasn’t able to get in. “Well, why haven’t you gone on your own?” I asked, waiting for some emotional response. Instead, he simply stated “I just never got around to it. And why would I even want to go to something so sad?”
Hayes is very proud to be Jewish; it makes his eyes light up every time he sees a Jewish reference at New York style delis or on the T.V. show “the Goldbergs” and is able to explain them to friends without this knowledge of Jewish culture. Hayes isn’t ignorant about the Holocaust. He has taken in-depth courses during his time in Hebrew school and had the opportunity to listen to speakers who came in to tell their personal stories about it. This was of course more intimate than anything that might be plastered on museum walls or inside of textbooks.
Still, I felt he should go. Or at least, I knew I wanted to go to the Holocaust museum again because it’s such a heavy part of history that I wasn’t able to fully grasp the first time I went. I wanted to take him because maybe he could learn something new. Hayes is the first Jewish person I’m aware of meeting. His background never got in the way of our relationship. I enjoy Christmas, and it sometimes bothers me that he doesn’t celebrate it. But it’s no deal breaker. I hoped that by going with him to the Holocaust museum, I would have a different and perhaps more intimate experience. And maybe it would even help bring us closer.
We made plans on upcoming weekends to visit, not just the Richmond museum we passed by, but also the one in DC. I was curious what it would be like to go together.
Visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Hayes came out of his bedroom dressed in a pink and blue stripped Brooks Brothers polo, the same one he bought for my cousins wedding the year before, making this just the second time he had worn it. He paired it with khaki pants and his favorite watch that he only wore on special occasions.
The museum is a grand building with tall glass doors and stern looking security guards posted outside. We had to walk through metal detectors and send our belonging through x-ray machines upon entering.
Before entering the main exhibit, we picked up a card with the story of someone’s life and as we went through the museum we can see whether or not they survived the Holocaust. Without even making it halfway through the exhibit I looked at my card and realized that I had already died, so I asked Hayes if he had died yet and he had. We had picked up a third card so I asked him to check that one. Without bothering to look at it, he simply snapped, “They all died, Ariana!”
There was a solemnness in his demeanor, he didn’t stand up tall and proud like his 6-foot body usually did. He shrank into himself, feeling inferior. Hayes walked quietly from one display to the next, spending a great deal of time reading each and every plaque carefully. This wasn’t the same light-hearted aspects of the Jewish culture that he related to, this was a place filled with heaviness. “It was an attempt at genocide, which if they had succeeded I would not be here right now because the Nazis did not plan to stop in Europe,” he said. “If they won World War two then I would not be here.”
As we were making our way through the exhibit we came upon a giant glass box in the middle of the room filled with sprawled out pieces of large paper. It was pieces of the Torah representing the damage that was done during Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass.” The night the Nazis broke the glass from Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues and destroyed their interiors. Throughout the museum so far Hayes had been quite reserved while taking in the heaviness of it all. But when we approached that dismembered Torah he then spoke up.
“It’s not like a Bible,” Hayes said, “People aren’t just handing them out. It serves a completely different purpose than a Bible does to a Christian. It’s not something that you just carry around with you in your pocket.”
Hayes explained that owning a Torah was a big deal because it was made out of the skin of cows, making it not able to be printed on but instead hand written by a scribe. It takes a little over a year just to make one Torah. Of course, there are printed versions of the Torah but they don’t equate the same value as these special documents.
“To read from the Torah is sacred…It’s a sacred artifact within itself and it’s a symbol of Jewish faith. And for someone to take this Torah, of which temples only really have one or two of because they’re so hard to come by, for them to rip up these sacred books that you’re not even supposed to touch with your hands, and throw it in the streets is probably one of the most disrespectful things to Jewish faith that you could probably do.”
I had been to this museum before but this time was much different; it was no longer just a history lesson. It took almost three hours for us to complete. I was sad and tired; I had never been to a museum with someone to actually read each and every plaque and examined every show case.
Visiting the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond
Less than a week later it was time to visit the Richmond museum. Now that Hayes had experienced one Holocaust museum, he was reluctant to spend another afternoon reading the same depressing material, but he knew he had made a promise and abided. He came out again in another nice shirt paired with that very same watch, his outfit showed how he deemed this a special occasion.
The Richmond museum was much smaller and more intimate than the one in D.C. It consisted mainly of how the Holocaust affected those in Virginia, as opposed to the D.C. museum, which was a national memorial. It had exhibits that did more showing than telling, such as replicating the detestable sleeping arrangements by placing hundreds of manikins on wooden barracks to show how tightly they were packed.
We passed a plaque that showed a heinous murder that took place during a pogrom, a violent riot aimed at an ethnic or religious group. The display read, “Vandalized Niegh Schul. Lithuanian citizens beheaded the rabbi during the first days of the Pogrom. The rabbi’s head was paraded around the streets before set on the window sill of his house.”
Before coming to the museum Hayes had just told me a story of how his Hebrew school teacher’s grandfather was a victim of pogroms. “One day when he was a boy, his village was run through by a pogrom, men on horseback with swords rode through the village and lopped the top of his head off,” he said. To anybody, hearing these stories is jarring especially when realizing that these anti-Semitic events were happening long before the Holocaust even started.
Hayes explained to me that events like pogroms created a pathway for such a tragedy to happen with little bystander intervention, “First of all, you have to endure years of being called lesser and being looked down upon,” he said. “They put them at the same level of rats… They lived outside the normal community so they weren’t seen as humans. They took them and were going to exterminate them like vermin. ‘It’s the Jews fault we lost World War One, they are the problem in society.” Then it gets to another level ‘Don’t trust Jews; Don’t shop at their shops,’ they enforce a boycott, they go around and mark Jewish stores, then they enforce the law that all Jews have to wear a gold star so they don’t contaminate us, and then from there and once everyone is singled out, they go to a separate community that the government forces them to live in.”
Upon exiting the museum, we noticed that there was a dim, unoccupied room off to the side. It was a synagogue, which contained an actual Torah. After hearing Hayes describe how sacred a Torah was, I was finally able to see one for myself. It was a large book, with thick slabs of paper, and illegible words. Even though it didn’t mean anything to me, just by the way Hayes looked at it you could tell that it was something sacred.
Torah in Virginia Holocaust Museum.
The Aftermath
That night we sat in my living room together, both of us doing homework. I kept asking him how certain parts of the museums made him feel, “Shitty, Ariana,” he repeated over and over after every question I asked, looking down at his books and papers instead of me. I could tell that he was full of emotion. But he wasn’t capable of expressing it to me. I kept pressing. I asked, “What even went on inside of those concentration camps?” Then he let his guard down. He put his homework down, turned his full body to me and talked elaborately with his hands.
“They tricked them! Not only is it dying in a gas chamber, they phrase it: ‘You’ve been in a cattle car. You need to take a shower’ and they force you to get undressed, and you get in the gas chamber with a bunch of men, women, and children. After everyone is dead they have other prisoners, Jews, come in a pick up all of their belongings and any kind of valuables or whatever and then they have more Jews come and take the bodies up, and they examine them to see if they had gold teeth or anything and robbed their faces.”
He turned his body back, picked up his homework and we sat in silence for the rest of the night. I thought of how he phrased the removal of gold teeth as robbing the Jew’s faces. Museums and text books try to tell us how much the Holocaust took from people, but not until I heard him say it in that way, that their faces were literally robbed, was I able to fully understand
My conclusion - was it worth it?
At the end of all of this, I felt sort of, well, guilty. When I first thought of this idea of making him go to a museum I deemed important it sounded harmless; I was under the impression that everybody should experience history this way. Was I exploiting Hayes? I was certainly making him feel uncomfortable, and I wondered if it was fair to keep pushing him to tell me how he felt.
Before we had gone to the D.C. museum was when I first started to feel this way. Because he lives in Fairfax Station, Va., a suburb outside of D.C., we stopped at his parent’s house on the way to the museum. We had told his parents that we were on our way to visit the museum, but I had this overbearing feeling of guilt and had to ask him to refrain from telling them I planned to write about it all. I didn’t want his parents thinking that I was taking advantage of their son, forcing him to interact with the most tragic event his culture has ever experienced.
And while I was conducting interviews, I realized how much he didn’t want to relive what he had just experienced at these museums. It was hard getting answers out of him; I had to hide my questions into conversations and secretly take notes.
I thought by taking Hayes to these museums I was showing him something he’s never seen before, but coming out of this experience I think I was the one that learned the most. He clarified facts in the museum and shared information that they can only be told through story telling. I was finally able to see what this meant to someone with his culture.