Michael suggested that I visit Yad Vashem today and I took his advice. It turns out that he was more correct than he realized because the main museum was open a few hours later than all other days of the week.
I took the light rail out to it’s final stop to the south and walked down the hill. There was a huge crowd of IDF soldiers already there and it was an otherwise busy day, it seemed. I went to the archive first for research. I heard a few people mention the conference while there.
Similar to my visit in DC to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Someone got me started but they just don’t have the time to explain exactly what they’re setting me up with. One database searched the Pages of Testimony, but those are online and I don’t need to see them when I visit in person.
The other database she sent me to had ITS files indexed. I found a few unexpected records. On the first, the woman helping me was surprised to find a file where someone seemed to request information about a relative, but she couldn’t find that person’s name anywhere on the pages. I was then able to continue the search in the way that she did and I found some interesting things. I still obviously need to comb through everything, and with a German dictionary, but I will make time when I get home.
I couldn’t save the digital files. She suggested I print them and pay per page. I really didn’t have an issue paying them a little, but the files were already digitized and that’s the format I want. So she suggested I could email and ask for them. I’ll do that when I get home, but I did take around 100 photos of the pages on the screen.
About to keel over from starvation, and nodding off a little from sleep deprivation, I left the research room a bit short of them kicking me out at closing time. I had a quick bite at the cafe and walked around the grounds. I’m pretty sure there should have been about twice as much as I saw, but I’m not sure where it was. I’ll need to consult a map and possibly return for another visit later.
As I mentioned, the museum was open late and I walked through. Two things stood out to me. At one point, there is a display of three bricks from the Warsaw ghetto wall. I was there a few years ago and saw the remainder of the wall. If I recall correctly, three bricks were missing and the wall said where they were. One was at Yad Vashem, one at USHMM, and one in Australia. I wonder where the other two bricks came from.
At the end of the museum was the Hall of Names, and now I know why it is called that. Pictures always show a display overhead of photos in a conical shape up to the ceiling, but all of the walls in the room were bookshelves lined with binders, containing rhe Pages of Testimony submitted over the years. And they have room for plenty more.
No pictures were allowed in the museum, but in the Hall of Names, one guy walked in while I was there and snapped several, not even muting his phone, so I didn’t feel too bad about doing the same (but without the camera noises). He even dared to do that right in front of the security guard at the exit.
(Those white “dots” in the back are the binder labels.)