On Anne Frank's birthday and a visit to the Holocaust Museum

The Anne Frank display at the Holocaust Museum.

Today, June 12 is Anne Frank's birthday. She would have been 90 had she not died in a Nazi concentration camp. But she left behind her diary, recording her brief life as well as her family's experience while hiding from the Nazis. It became renowned around the world as a testament to the human spirit.

When Kim and I were in Washington, D.C. last month, we visited the Holocaust Museum, which has an Anne Frank display showing where her family hid, photos of Anne through her childhood, and details about what happened to her and her family. The museum itself is a haunting experience. As you begin a tour through its four floors, you pick an "identity card" which has the biography of an actual Holocaust victim, or survivor. Victims outnumber survivors.

Mine was for a shoemaker who was taken by the Nazis, shipped to a ghetto in eastern Europe, and was never to be heard of again. Kim's identity card was for an 18-year-old Polish girl who was in the Warsaw Ghetto. She died fighting in the ghetto uprising against the Germans.

Elevators take you to the top floor to begin your tour. The front of the elevators look like gas chamber doors, and inside the cars bare light bulb

s in cages overhead provide illumination. I'm not sure if it's the museum staff's practice, or if it just happened, but our elevator car was packed with visitors, surely nearing its capacity.

On the fourth floor, you learn about pre-war life for the Jews in Germany and Europe and the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It's frightening to see how easily Hitler and his minions gained power, slowly overwhelming the government and generating threats that aroused the people. Hitler turned the people against the press, against his political opposition with his lies and propaganda. His stooges reinforced his message until they had complete control of the government, and the nation. There were those who spoke out against Hitler and the Nazis, but they didn't speak out long before they were silenced.

Life for the Jews never had been easy, but through many many years they'd assimilated into German life and were a thriving, vital part of the nation's society and culture. Photo exhibits and displays at the museum show they really were no different than other Germans and Europeans. They lived and worked among the gentile majority, contributed so much to the arts, science, culture. But Hitler, through his endless, repetitive propaganda and by feeding anti-Semitism made Jews the "enemy" and convinced the Germans they had to be eradicated.

Not only the Jews, but the mentally and physically handicapped, the Romani -- or gypsies -- intellectuals, homosexuals, and anyone deemed inferior to the Nazi's Aryan ideals. There's a display of a huge poster depicting the inferior races and people, among them Asians, Native Americans, and blacks.

One exhibit in particular had an impact on me. It featured photographs taken by a Jewish family of photographers showcasing the day-to-day life in a Jewish community through several generations. Weddings, celebrations, portraits, everyday life. The framed photos covered four walls around a walkway and extended from the fourth floor to the first floor. Thousands of people in hundreds of photographs. At the time of the Holocaust, there were a couple of thousand residents in that village and surrounding area mostly Jewish. After the war, there were none.

As you progress to the third floor, you learn about the war years and the beginning of the Holocaust. You learn how stricter and stricter laws were enacted to isolate the Jews. It reached the point where it was illegal to have any association with Jews. The government stripped Jews of their businesses, their homes and property, everything. The Nazis walled off Jewish neighborhoods and communities, forced them into ghettos, and ultimately began sending them to concentration camps.

It's in this portion of the museum that you begin learning of what would come next and be the focal point of the second floor -- the Final Solution.

A rail car similar to those used to transport Jews
to the death camps.

Displays on the second floor show how the Nazis dealt with Jews and other "undesirables." From ghettos. Jews were herded into box cars, as many as a hundred or more jammed into one car, and thousands crowded onto the trains. I felt claustrophobic standing in an empty car on display. These death trains took the Jews to the concentration camps. On their arrival, the people were divided, some being sent off to slave labor where they'd be worked to death, others immediately dispatched to the gas chambers.
The museum also shows the aftermath of the Holocaust, when Allied troops liberated the camps. Videos show how they reacted and how they helped the survivors. One shows the German residents of a town next to the concentration camp being forced to go through it and see what they had ignored and allowed to happen.

By the time you reach the first floor again, you find yourself thinking about all you've seen and wondering if it could happen again. Personally, I say yes, yes it could. A few years ago, I interviewed missionaries who had been in an African country when war broke out there, and one tribe set out to destroy another. Genocide was part of the Serb-Croat conflict. ISIS and Muslim extremists carry out jihad against infidels. Dissidents are rounded up still in China and North Korea, disappearing into their "legal" systems.

So yes, it could happen again, which is why the Holocaust Museum is so important, and why it's important to remember the Holocaust. It's why today, on what would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday, I'm sharing this and these thoughts with you. Never forget.