It is an overwhelming task to react briefly to a visit to the Museum of Tolerance’s Holocaust Exhibit. Overall my reaction is that there are so many facets to this period of history. My understanding has been quite elementary. Bad Germans try to kill neutral Jews. Perhaps that sums it up in a vague sort of way, but a trip to the Museum begins to add vast amounts of detail to this simple fact. Unexpectedly, I reacted to a different aspect of the World War II Germany era. Upon finding the description and biography of Albert Einstein, I began seeing him, and American acceptance and tolerance in a different light. Again, to make a simple sentence: Einstein the great scientist finds way to threaten and save the world. But this belies a different context. The fact that Einstein could have – most certainly would have – been another Jewish victim of the Holocaust snuck up on me. Accustomed to his traditional portraits, it is hard to reconcile the vision of him, naked, standing on the edge of a mass grave facing machine guns. This is an uncomfortable picture and thought. It is sadly easier to think of the other Jews in the pictures of the camps, faceless nobodies to most visitors like me. They are just ‘the Jews.’ But it is much harder to go back in one’s mind to kill Einstein, so to speak. I could have spent much more time considering this near-event. What would the world have been like? Would America have been able to win the war? Would we still have developed the atomic bomb?
The second consideration of mine came as a result of reflecting on the Museum’s name: Tolerance. Again, using Einstein as the example, it is impossible to imagine him never coming here. But that did take tolerance. It took an America that was ready to harbor fugitives from an enemy country. It took open mindedness along with this tolerance to accept that not everyone from that country would, in fact, be an enemy. And it took tolerance to bring him to our country as not only an esteemed person, but as an important revolutionary who would somehow bring us not only to the edge of destruction, but to the brink of peace.
