Musuem of Tolerance - Essay Example

Museum of tolerance has been an unparalleled educational and emotional experience for me. While walking among the exhibits, I was wondering on the two contradictory aspects of human nature. The museum is proof to the extend to which humans are capable of keeping hope in the face of any great challenge. But this place is also a sad reminder of the fact that there is no end to human cruelty as well. I understand that this museum was primarily established as a proof of the holocaust as the younger generation was starting to believe that the Nazi genocide was simply a fairy tale.

I visited the holocaust section, tolerance centre, and the multimedia learning centre of the museum. The two and half hour guided tour was full of new information and an episode of holocaust memories revisited. And I entered the tolerance centre through the prejudiced door. It was a moment of realization that we all hold prejudices which can grow to dangerous proportions and can become a threat to others, if left unchecked. The drinking fountains named “whites only” and “coloured” once again reminded me of the world of prejudices.

The pseudo gas chamber that I saw just moments before rushed into mind again when I saw these two labels.The concentration camp gate that shows two gates with the labels, “able bodied” and “children and others”, was a shocking sight that evoked history like lightning. It was through this kind of a gate that children and weak bodied adults walked through into gas chambers in concentration camps to get exhumed alive. And even after such suffering, human prejudices continue to exist. The quotations and slogans written on the walls especially attracted and inspired me.

The skit that showed the contemporary racial prejudices was also well enacted. The :point of view diner” was another unique experience for me. The simple example shown on this interactive show leads smoothly to bigger racial and discrimination related questions. The message that every one is responsible for what is happening in our society seems extremely relevant to me. I watched the film on genocide in the small theatre. And then the holocaust section. But I felt the narration is a little bit vague and inaccurate as was observed by many others (Marcuse).

But I really felt like experiencing “a living social document” (Miller, 248f). The film show that followed made me realize that it was ordinary people put in not so ordinary situations who committed all these genocides and crimes. The voices in the mock Wannsee conference were proof to the cold blooded planning that went into the holocaust. Sitting in the hall of witness, which is modeled after a gas chamber, I listened to the testimonies. The holocaust survivor Edith Freilich narrated her story of loss and pain.

This account was the most memorable and important moment for me in the museum of tolerance. Because, even when one knows what kind of horrible things have happened, our mind has a tendency to underplay it so as to keep us emotionally undisturbed. This is a survival mechanism. But to build a society in which genocides will not be repeated, it is very important that one has to have memories of the past. It is these memories that are evoked by the testimony of the holocaust survivor. The small collection of relics was an encounter with reality after the prolonged tour in the virtual world of multimedia presentations.

While touching some of those artifacts, I felt I could feel at least a very small percentage of the pain and suffering that millions of people went through in the holocaust. Works CitedJudith Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust, New York: Touchstone, 1991.Marcuse, Harold, Experiencing the Jewish Holocaust in Los Angeles: The Beit Hashoah—Museum of Tolerance, Other Voices, vol.2, No.1, February 2000.web.November 20, 2010, http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/marcuse/tolerance.html