Atrocities Abroad

About a week ago, I drove to Dallas to visit a museum that I have been meaning to go to for a long time - The Dallas Holocaust Museum. I know, it's kind of a downer, especially since I went there the day after Christmas!

Anyway, I am absolutely intrigued with WWII and history, so I just had to go. When I was in Europe during college, I visited Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany and it was both horrifying and intriguing at the same time. And as sick as it sounds, they said that Dachau was like the "Ritz Carlton" of all the camps - mostly political prisoners, priests, etc. It was not an extermination/death camp like Auschwitz or others. Either way, it's just atrocious what happened at ANY of them.

Here is a physical representation of the timeline of the rise of Nazis...

These are actual 'uniforms' for the prisioners at a concentration camp:

These are some of the patches that the Jews had to sew onto their clothes to identify themselves.

So sick, but this is a container filled with gold fillings from people's teeth - before they burned the bodies, they extracted all of the gold/metals from their teeth so they could get the money for it.

And here are some childrens' shoes in a pile - when they made the prisoners strip down before going into the 'showers' (gas chambers). So sad.

Some cooking utensils from Auschwitz - by far the worst and most brutal camp.

And some barbed wire from Auschwitz....

Guards' whips from Dachau (the camp that I visited):

Here are some ashes from one of the camps - I imagine they are from one of the 'ovens.' At Dachau, the ovens are still there, with ash still in them. It is VERY sobering and devastating just to see even the remnants left behind 60+ years later.

This is a beautiful memorial that was in the last room of the museum - very pretty and moving.

Around the memorial, they had a chain with posts and each post represented a concentration camp.