Things we saw about the Holocaust by mia

Today we visited a concentration camp on our way to Frankfort from Amsterdam called Camp Vught. It was a bit boring because all the information boards were in Dutch so we couldn't read about what we were seeing. A few things were obvious enough though, the crematorium and the lab place where they dissected people were easy to figure out. The crematorium had a bunch of person sized ovens, and the dissection place had a concrete table that had troughs for blood to drain into. It was a pretty gross thought! There was also a memorial listing all the names of the kids who had been killed there. Many of them were just babies, some of them were less than a year old! It was really sad.

We have been to a lot of different holocaust related museums and exhibits and the Camp Vught one definitely wasn't the best. The two that were the most touching/ horrifying were an exhibit in the London war museum and Anne Franks house. The exhibit in London had a sign and a guard outside he door that had a warning and advisory that said that kids under 14 shouldn't go inside. Daddy and I were the only ones to go into it because everyone else was lost in some other maze like exhibit. The holocaust exhibit was really big and was set up so you go through this maze of dark rooms with gross pictures of emancipated bodies and stuff. There was information on the mistreatment of the Jews in the Ghettos, all of the nasty laws that Hitler made, and finally the concentration camps. It was a really crazy exhibit and I, at least, came out of there a teeny bit misty eyed.

The visit to Anne Frank's house was just as emotional, but, unlike the last one, there was a teeny speck of happy (that was still sorta sad) mixed in with all of the tragedy. There were lots of quotes from her diary that said that she wanted to become a famous writer and leave a legacy through her writing. She certainly has done both of those things, even if she doesn't know it! In the museum we walked through the old jam factory under the Secret Annex and through the rooms that The Franks shared with four other people (the Van Pels and another man who was a family friend). The space was bigger than the one we have been sharing for the last year, but we have been able to go outside during the day and make noise. They had to be really quiet all the time and they were always stuck up in those same few rooms with the same few people all of the time.

Anne had tons of time on her hands so she wrote a lot. She filled a few diaries and wrote short stories and things on loose sheets of paper. Her dad found all of it at the end of the war and had her diary published. He edited it a bunch first, and took out inappropriate or mean things she wrote in it. There are tons of different versions, some including different things. I think it was really nice that Anne Frank got what she wanted. She has a global legacy and her diary is pretty much a classic!