Ashleigh Young: A Day I Will Never Forget

On Saturday February 6, Methodist College's class Suffering and Forgiveness took a trip to Chicago to go to the Holocaust Museum and meet with Magda Brown, who is a Holocaust Survivor. A little information about the Holocaust: in 1933 Hitler and his party came to  power in Germany. Hitler discriminated against Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. By 1942, he conceived a plan called "the final solution:" murdering all Jews. They were sent to ghettos and concentration camp, where 6 million Jews ended up dying. 

This topic has always brought interest to me; I cannot exactly say why, but I want to learn about it and it has been my desire to meet a survivor.  I could honestly spend all day at the Illinois Holocaust Museum. It was like a giant maze: you walked through different rooms and it told you different pieces of information on what happened. In various places, there were TVs where you could listen to survivors talk about the experiences they encountered.  The room that chocked me up was the one where they talked about the concentration camps where millions were murders. They had a display of what a gas chamber looked like and what happened at each phase of the chamber. It makes me sick that Hitler and his followers did not treat these people like humans; in fact, when they arrived at the concentration camps, people received a whole new identity: they no longer had their names; they were numbers. As if taking their names and families away from them was not enough, people were stripped of their clothes and were shaved, regardless of whether they were male or female. They were thrown a piece of clothing without paying attention whether it would fit or not. 

At the end of the museum, the atmosphere lighten a bit. You can hear about people who got out, about some brothers and sisters reuniting, and about how they escaped from hell. 

My favorite part of the trip came at the end, when we met Mrs. Magda Brown. Not only was she so inspiring and had such gratitude about herself, but she took pride in teaching about this information. I will never forget a part in her story where she told us how she was in the train that took her to Auschwitz. They were literally taken in boxes (you could see the size of such a box in the museum and go inside of it). Mrs. Brown was in there with her mom and others who were tightly squeezed in. In the box they had two bowels, one for drinking water, and one for going to the bathroom. It never got emptied during the trip. They never received more water.

Once they got off the train in Auschwitz, they had to leave their little bag of things they had with them and then line up. In those lines an officer would point which way you would go. Mrs. Brown was pointed on way, and her mother was pointed another. It was the last moment when she saw her mother. When Mrs. Magda Brown talked about that part, it was so hard to fight back tears. I could not imagine never seeing my mother again and knowing she is about to die. Her story is so powerful and so inspiring. Saturday February 6, is a day I will never forget.