Yesterday, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and participated in a guided tour along with some classmates. What I saw was perhaps one of the most influential events in my life. Usually, very much unlike my parents who scrutinize via magnifying glass , I breeze through museums exhibitions, long paragraphs, and artifacts, my mind completely navigated toward only the highlights of attractions. But this tour, with a peer ambassador of the USHMM, opened my eyes to otherwise unnoticed details (the architecture, the shortest sentences, the destruction).Some images are too graphic to not be engraved in my mind. The various "medical experiments" on 8-year-old children done by "esteemed" scientists, the capacity of the gas chambers and its ability to kill so many in so few seconds, and the shells of living men, too frail and too tainted with immorality to ever be their old self again, have all been branded into my memory bank, never to be forgotten, never to be considered anything less than significant.
Sometimes, I think in retrospect the inhumanity that has happened, and I question whether it is real or a nightmare. Why do humans want to inflict such pain to their own kind. "Are we all humans? Or are some humans more human than others?"- Romeo Dallaire (UN LGen stationed in Rwanda).What is history without personal accounts? Biographies? Letters, newspapers, photographs? We all say that the holocaust shall not happen again as long as such information is not forgotten. But genocide is happening as we speak. Halfway around the world, in Darfur. Men, women and children are being killed shamelessly everyday by their government, the very officials they are supposed to trust. This almost reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984, a dystopia of some sorts. I will encourage myself to do more for humanity; I may not have the power to bring world peace individually, but by raising awareness and organizing fundraisers, I can do as much as I can to stop such a despicable event.
