Apr 15, 2015 2 min read

The deaths of nearly 6 million Jews and many more innocent people might be painful to revisit, but the Holocaust, a mass genocide carried out in Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories, can’t be ignored because it’s important to keep such tragedies from happening again. The deaths of millions of men, women and children must be remembered.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., serves as both an educational facility and memorial for victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their families.

Many people enter the museum each day, with admission being free, but on my recent visit, the inside of the museum was as nearly as silent as the dead it memorializes.

The only people speaking in the museum in anything more than a hushed whisper were volunteers, families with small children and the occasional survivor there to remember with friends and families.

Some were there to share their experiences.

One group was led by an older woman and I assumed the people following her were those whose ancestors survived or were killed during the Holocaust.

The group leader managed to escape eastern Europe but some of her friends and family perished in concentration camps.

I followed that group for a while in silence, listening to the woman’s stories as we passed each exhibit.

The museum was a somber experience. As you walk through it, there are exhibits of personal belongings and photographs with victims’ names. Other exhibits mention towns which were left vacant by the Holocaust. Exhibits like one about the liberation of the concentration camps, contained video footage. I had to walk away.

The toughest thing was listening to footage of war trials and hearing Nazi leaders admit they had no regrets.