Schools out 10/17: Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem is the memorial and museum of the holocaust, situated in Western Jerusalem.

I can't really describe the experience in a way that does it justice. The most important thing to know is that it is intensely personal. There were large artefacts, such as the side of a Dachau train carriage used to convey people to their murder, and small items such as toys, photographs, and items of clothing. Every single one was real. Everything you saw was connected to the mass murder of Jews,  gypsies, people deemed defective, and people politically opposed to the Nazi regime. Something as seemingly impersonal as a lamp post from a concentration camp made me stop and stare and feel how awful the reality was. I watched the people around me as well, so many of them sombre and shocked. One man watched a film of the camps and obsessively rubbed his arm where the inmates were branded with their numbers as if trying to psychologically erase the branding of people for death.

The building is an incredible triangular conduit, I would guess some twenty metres high and very long. You walk through it, criss crossing past the exhibits and video testimony from survivors.

At the end when I walked into the memorial hall I just burst into tears. I'm not even Jewish, you don't have to be. I just blubbed for the ease at which bad thoughts turned into a disaster for humanity and felt chilled at the thought of how easily it could happen again.

As to the Children's memorial ? almost indescribable. Candles, mirrors and the softly recited names and ages of all of those who died in the death camps create a vertiginous sense of falling back into history whilst at the same time hoping that the souls of those children somehow were lifted into a better place beyond this pain. And I'm not even religious. You don't have to be.

So what's the connection with today's picture? I took it before I went to Yad Vashem and thought long and hard about using it. It's a shot of the hotel pool and people swimming happily in the sun. A little bit 'eighties Hockney I like to think. No photoshopping, just looks nice.

I thought I might not put anything up today, or just a photo of the outside of the Yad Vashem building. I thought I might just leave a blank wall. But I went instead with this because it celebrates life. It celebrates colour, and people just being people. Everything the Nazis tried to deny and some people still try to deprive the world of.

The holocaust started with ordinary everyday wickedness and escalated into genocide. All I can think of now is how easy it is to be bad and how important it is to try and be good.

I'm not a particularly good person. You don't have to be. You just have to try and be good and do everything you can in your life to make sure that bad things don't happen, and nothing like this ever does again.