My experience at the Museum of Tolerance was an experience that will stay with me forever. We started by looking at the early rises of the Nazi party, I saw the struggle of the German People and the German Jews living in the biggest depression of their time. The currency was worthless, and families lived off of soup kitchens and they lived in old buildings. I began to feel for their struggle. I began to understand how desperate they were. They were so desperate, they let a troubled man with a deep hatred take power. Hitler used an age old scapegoat to turn the heads of the people and turn them in a terrible direction. Hitler blamed the Jews for everything, he especially blamed the Jews for taking all of the wealth. We learned about the terror of Kristallnacht and the mass deportation of Jews from their homes. Later in the tour, we heard a holocaust survivor named Rolf Gompertz talk about his experience during Kristallnacht. He said “As the Storm Troopers entered our house they chased down my father and cornered him... He reached into his desk and pulled out his Iron Cross which was awarded to him during WWI,” this quote moved me in a certain way. It made me think about how these people who had served their country, those who had risked their lives to save their country, had been deported like they didn’t belong in the country.

Elie Wiesel said”once you hear a witness, you become a witness,” I had become a witness. I had sat in a life sized model of the gas chambers, I had seen footage of people being shoved into a train and transported to the death camps. I had become a witness. A wise man once said, “history always finds a way to repeat itself,” I think that it is important for people to know exactly what happened to the Jews and all the other people who were sent to the Concentration camps. People need to see the motivations of Hitler and the struggle of the Jews so they understand that this cannot happen again.