Oh my God, what a place! Upon entering the museum, I expected what one would generally expect from a holocaust museum, general facts, gruesome pictures,and a lot of anti-Semitic propaganda from the past, but this place was completely different. Now luckily, my brother is a police officer and got all of us in ahead of everyone else with his ID, but I believe the museum is free regardless, they just have you wait on line for some minutes while they hand out passes.

After receiving our passes, we headed over to the permanent exhibition area and were told to get passport looking ID cards before entering the elevator. There were two pamphlet holders on each side of the elevator lobby filled with male and female ID cards. The IDs contained information about a real person in the Holocaust; what they did before it and, if they died, how they died or how they were rescued. A small portrait came along in my passport of a little boy from Poland who was forced to wear a golden clothed star to identify that he was Jewish and how he and his family were gasses at the Belzec camp in 1942. An extremely sad story, but what makes it worse is that it is completely true and happened to millions of people. There was a sign inside the museum, "there weren’t six million murders, there was one murder six million times."

I don’t want to give too much away about this place, but it was intense and informative. I think we spent just about two hours inside walking through the exhibit, seeing recreations of the bunks were people slept in, the ovens that were used, the train cars used, and anything else you can think of. There was one part that had tons of human hair, because the Germans would cut the hair off and sell it in 40 pound bundles for different purposes. Also, the experiments done to people to see how different things would effect the German soldiers in different scenarios was unnerving. Well, the whole place is unnerving and it's shocking that this happened in the first place. One thing that I found especially interesting was that the Allied forces knew where Auschwitz Concentration Camp was but didn’t bomb it for fear that another, worse camp would open doing more long-term damage.

One of the greatest parts of this museum was the Darfur exhibit near the exit. Acknowledging that the situation in Darfur could, and most likely will, lead to a museum being setup in the same fashion of the Holocaust Museum, this exhibit is great. It opens up our eyes to the fact that we can make a stand now instead of seeing things in perfect 20/20 hindsight.

So, if you find yourself in or around D.C., please stop by the Holocaust Museum, it is totally worth it and I swear that you won’t regret it.

A very powerful museum, the exhibits don't hold back. They show the true massacre and decimation. There are video monitors that are surrounded by concrete walls: if you are tall enough to look over them, you may be old enough to see them. Some pictures are so gory, that they cannot be seen by kids. The sights are so tragic that people are left in tears. There are models of crematoriums, an exhibit showing how many shoes were removed from the victims of the Holocaust (a room full of them), clothes, pictures, diaries, etc. If you have been to the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Museum in L.A., you will know that that one is modeled exactly like the pathways through Germany. Almost everything there is video. Here, it is photo and even more disturbing than the other. If you are faint hearted or your kids are, I advise you to think otherwise.

Museums normally celebrate the achievements of humanity activity; the Holocaust Museum showcases the worse. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime. Other groups, such as Gypsies, the handicapped, Slavic people, and homosexuals were also killed. The exhibits on display are some of the most moving, tragic, and unbelievable representations of history I have witnessed. Normally for me I get restless and bored after spending 2 hours in a museum, but I happily spent more than 6 hours here.

Upon entry to the museum, you are given a mock passport of a real person, charting their history through the Holocaust, allowing you to feel emotionally connected as you walk through the exhibits. The museum uses documentary films, videos, audio-taped oral histories, and items such as a freight car, used to transport Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, and Star of David patches that Jewish prisoners were made to wear to portray the history of the Holocaust. Especially stirring is the Hall of Faces, a narrow, three-story-high space crammed with framed photographs of the 3,000 Jewish residents of a single Lithuanian town, who were murdered in September 1941, and the collection of shoes of murdered Jews, where the mixed smell of sweat and leather can still be smelt. Some of the images on show can be very disturbing, and I would not recommend it for young children.

The adjacent Hall of Remembrance provides a space for quiet reflection after your experience walking through the exhibits. In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum also has a multimedia learning center, a resource center for students and teachers, a registry of Holocaust survivors, and occasional special exhibitions.

Amongst the museum staff are Holocaust survivors willing to talk about their experiences and answer any questions you may have. I had many questions to ask, but after my experience in the museum, I wasn’t feeling like asking questions. To me, it felt wrong and insensitive. I can imagine, though, for people, who were alive during the Holocaust, it is nice to share your experiences with someone else who went through the same things.

As with other museums in Washington, entry is free and tickets can be obtained on the day of your visit at the museum, or in advance by calling www.tickets.com (800) 400-9373. If you are collecting your tickets at the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis, it is essential to get there as early as possible, around 8am to avoid disappointment and a long wait. The museum policies are quite strict. As expected, no eating, drinking, or smoking is allowed, and all visitors pass through metal detectors upon entry. Photography, video, and audio recording is also prohibited.

The Holocaust Museum is open from 10am-5:30pm every day, apart from Yom Kippur (October 2nd) and Christmas Day. Hours are extended on Tuesdays and Thursdays from April through mid-June until 7:50pm. For more information, visit www.ushmm.org, or call the museum on (202) 488-0400.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum demonstrates, if nothing else, that there is no limit to the inhumanity of man to his fellow man. Galleries and displays do not sanitize the horror of the Holocaust, and as such, it is not recommended for children younger than 13 due to the images. There were images here I had never seen before, and they are horrifying. I can only guess that the filmstrips I saw in school were edited because they were considered too "strong".

The museum itself is designed to resemble an early 20th-century factory--an analogy, I think, to the factory-like mechanization of death the Nazis developed. As you enter, you are encouraged to pick up a "passport" that corresponds to a real victim of the Holocaust. Cues in the museum tell you when to open your passport and find out who you are, what your life was like prior to the Holocaust, and your fate. The museum recounts the rise of the Nazis, the beginings of the "Final Solution", and implementation, and well as the liberation and what followed. The experience is sobering and shocking. Two items in particular struck me: one a image of a fetus cut from its mother's womb and tossed in a mass grave, the other a model of the gas chambers, showing each step from the entry of the victims into the undressing rooms to their deaths. The sculpture clearly gave individual victims expressions of terror and pain in the gas chamber. Although not fun in the slightest, this is an important museum to visit, "lest we forget".

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." ~William Shakespeare

To get on the upper levels, you had to call Pro Tix (800/400-9373) to get a timed pass. My classmates and I were shoved into this tiny, cramped elevator after we received small blue booklets with the U.S. seal and "For the dead and the living we must bear witness" printed on top. The booklets contained a person through the Holocaust, and on each floor we saw what happened to the person. A small movie theater on the third floor introduced how Hitler came to power and blamed the Jews for their debts. Through the floors, I saw how the Jews were tortured with the gas chamber, labor camps, the prisons, and cruel medical experiments. I was a little disturbed by some of the images, but they made me remember this actually had happened long ago.

The museum did a wonderful job recapturing what happened. You were intrigued about what was around every corner. What really got to me was a room of shoes. Each shoe represented the hundreds of people who died. Depressing and enjoyable, the museum is a reminder of what hate can do to a country. The end of the floors is walking down a long staircase to the Hall of Witness, where Daniel's Story is. The exhibit was a hands-on exhibition, telling what happened to this boy and his family. I didn't know there was a gift shop, so I stood looking around at this enormous hall with millions of people. This museum has truly remembered what was on the booklet: "For the dead and the living we must bear witness."