Holocaust class left impact

    It’s been nearly 80 years since the beginning of the horrific  annihilation upon the Jewish faith known as the Holocaust, and still to this day, its lavish historical content is ubiquitous to all generations.
    After taking a class at St. Scholastica Academy to learn about the Holocaust and making a weeklong trip to Washington, D.C., and the Holocaust Museum, the views we share as a community have not changed.
    We remember standing outside of the Holocaust Museum, buzzing with the anticipation of receiving new information and ready to witness the images, objects and audio from the execrable crime witnessed by survivors and family members.
    It hurt us internally to begin this process because at the start we were each given an identification card as if we were an individual who had been through this event. One of us was presented as a mother of four with a husband who were abducted from home and taken to Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp known in history.
    It struck internally because this woman was abducted  simply because of a faith she was born into. It goes to show that something so innocent could turn into something violent and vicious.
     While walking through the museum, we saw different artifacts from the Holocaust period. We walked through a ghastly train car that once carried scared Jewish prisoners to and from concentration camps. The train held immense, untold stories of lives lost, and it was visually disturbing to think that thousands of innocent lives were stripped of human dignity and put into this car.
    After passing through the train, we saw a wall of innocent children’s depictions of the Holocaust, jarring us into a deafening silence of those souls who had no means of defending themselves. Nearly every individual passing these pictures was silent, because they were remembering that these irreproachable children were murdered for their faith.
    It is still hard to accept.
    One of the final stops on the museum tour was a haunting room with the shoes. Hundreds of thousands of decrepit shoes were piled on the sides of the walkway, the smell of aging leather extremely pervasive.
    Words from the famous poem, “I Saw a Mountain,” by Moshe Shulstein were cadaverously inscribed on the wall above the shoes, affirming, “We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses, we are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers…”
    Abbey Heap and Meghan Rooney are seniors at St. Scholastica Academy in Covington.