Yad Vshem - by Katrina

The first thing we did today was go to Yad V'shem. Yad V'shem is the Holocaust Museum in Israel. It is shaped like a triangle because there is no way out of a triangle, and it showed that the Jews had no way to get out. Also, you can not walk from room to room. You have to zig zag to get to the other rooms. This too is done to remind us that they Jews had no choice in where they were going. The museum was very eye opening to me. I had no idea it was that bad during the Holocaust. We learned how many Jews were killed, and saw some of the ways they were killed. It showed me how lucky I am to be alive and Jewish. In the museum, they had pictures, documents and artifacts from the Holocaust. One room was about the ghettos, one room about the camps, one about the resistance, and one about Righteous Gentiles - people who risked their own lives, trying to save Jews. The final room had books, with the names of nearly four million of the victims of the Nazis. They told us they will never be able to find all the names, because there are whole towns which were wiped out - and no one was left that knows who anyone was that lived in them, as they all perished in the Holocaust.