This is the main hall of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Yes, the walls really do lean in that way, giving you the feeling of being trapped and about to be crushed. One is not supposed to take pictures there, but I wanted this one and so I did it secretly. Most of the exhibits are in the rooms off this disquieting hall.
Most of it I knew, having read a dozen survivor narratives over the years and taken a college history course on the Nazis in the 1960s before the teaching of history slid into its present relativistic swamp.
The pictures, the faces and names of the dead, were the emotional part of the exhibits for me. And the simple quotes, especially the short ones: “Today they came and took my only child away.”
For the first time, though, I got a real understanding of why there was not more resistance among the lambs driven to the slaughter: because the Nazis were very careful, right up until they turned on the gas, to make the people think that death was not the aim of it all.
No one getting off those freight cars at the extermination camps, however already grossly humiliated, could be sure what would happen to them and their families until it was too late.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 