I wrote this a couple of weeks back. All eighth-graders at my school, such as myself, have the honor of going to the Museum of Tolerance for a day.

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What is tolerance? To me, tolerance is being able to look beyond what a person’s beliefs are, what color his skin is, what brand of shirt she is wearing, and accept then for who they truly are. A person’s value does not depend on how much money they have or where they come from. Rather, the quality of a person’s heart should be the key point in judgment.

Visiting the Museum of Tolerance, while not a cheerful family outing, is imperative to promote one’s understanding of the terrifying pain sentient beings can inflict on each other. The Museum of Tolerance’s long spiral ramp is like a portal which leads us back in time, through the seaports of New York to the streets of Montgomery, from the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto to the cold, bare gas chamber of a death camp. One can read about the segregation of the South or the horrors of the Holocaust, but nothing can compare to walking through the halls of the Museum, among the ghosts of all those people, blacks, homosexuals, Gypsies and Jews, who are proof of the awful things that have happened, that still happen today, and will continue to happen in the future unless we do something to stop it.

The Museum of Tolerance is not just there to teach people what happened decades ago. It is a living memorial of the dead, and a reminder that history repeats itself, unless we learn from the mistakes of the past. On my personal trip through the time warp, I experienced what it must have been like as a Jew in Europe, or a black in the Southeast. The reality is that these things are still happening today. Perhaps they don’t happen as much in my sheltered mountain haven, but in places just down the hill, people are hurt by bigotry and racism every day. The museum truly brings about feeling of fear, feelings of abhorrence, but most of all, feelings of compassion and determination to stop history from repeating itself again.

I mentioned on a previous page that reading about the Holocaust is trivial compared to the actual experience of the concentration camps. On our class trip, we were lucky enough to hear the story of a Jewish survivor, Joseph Aleksander, who was sent through many different camps before finally regaining his freedom. Joseph, or “Joe,” is a nice man, who likes making people laugh. During his retelling of his teenage years, he always tried to find opportunities for humor, although such opportunities were scarce against the menacing backdrop of Holocaust Europe. For me, one of the most poignant parts of his tale was when he spoke of the trip to a death camp. As the captives stood in the cold, waiting to board the train to hell, a girl spoke to Joseph, asking him to protect her. He agreed and held onto her hand. Mere seconds later, they were swept apart by the crowd. He never saw that girl again.

Although Joseph survived the camps, eventually marrying and settling in California, the horrors he lived through still haunt him over the decades, and will remain with him until his death. The Holocaust is not something to forget. It is something to look back on, to remember, and most of all, to learn from.