Mikaela wrote the following article about our fieldtrip for The Voice, a statewide homeschooling magazine. I'll let her tell you all about it:
The
Richmond Holocaust Museum Field Trip by Mikaela
Recently,
my homeschool co-op has been learning about the Holocaust in our history
class. In order to understand it better,
we read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom as well as The Diary of Anne
Frank. We also watched the movie The
Boy in Stripped Pajamas. All of these assignments were based on true
stories and I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of the Holocaust, but
then our co-op went on a field trip to the Richmond Holocaust Museum. It wasn’t until I went there that I actually
felt the true horror of that tragedy.
The Richmond Holocaust Museum is located on East Cary
Street in the Shockhoe Bottom area of the city.
Instead of going directly to the museum, we decided to take the “scenic
route” there, so we parked at Tredegar
Iron Works and had an enjoyable, mile long hike along the Canal Walk.
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| Here's some street art along the Canal Walk |
When
we arrived at the museum, our tour guide had us watch a video about the
Holocaust. The video recounted the
horrific experiences of the Ipson family. The Ipson family were Lithuanian Jews
who were rounded up and put into a ghetto, which was basically a Nazi- run work
camp where Jews were forced to work long hours for no pay and very little
food. Most of the people in the ghetto
died. The educated professionals were
executed outright because the Nazis feared they would outsmart them and
rebel. Many others were shipped out to
concentration camps where they were also killed. The Ipson family was lucky because the Nazis
mistakenly believed that Mr. Ipson was a mechanic, so he and his family were
not killed. Instead, they used him to
fix their vehicles. Eventually, the
Ipsons escaped from the ghetto and spent the next 9 months in hiding. For most of this time, they lived underground in a small hole used by a local farmer
to store potatoes. At the end of the
war, they were repatriated by the Russians and ultimately immigrated to Richmond, Virginia. After arriving in America, the Ipsons started a successful auto parts
business and used the proceeds to help fund the Holocaust Museum.
The museum educated us greatly about the Holocaust, but
what I found most interesting were the exhibits about the concentration camps. I
learned that the Nazis had literally thousands of concentration camps which
were used to eliminate people they considered undesirable. These included Jews, gypsies, mentally and
physically handicapped people, as well as prisoners of war. The exhibit had a real rail car that was used
to transport prisoners, a “shower room” which was really a gas chamber, a
crematorium, as well as a room that was a bunkhouse.
One thing I will never forget is the
exhibit about the harmful “medical experiments” the Nazis did on the prisoners, even
children. The Germans did these experiments
often just to torture people. For
example, they would seal people in a tube and see how much air pressure the
human body could endure. Or they would
put prisoners in a bath of ice cold water and then put them in boiling water to
see how quickly their bodies could adapt to different temperatures. The museum had exhibits showing many of these
experiments.
The Richmond Holocaust Museum is not the most uplifting
place, but I believe it’s important that everyone visit it. The Ipson family founded the Museum to make
sure that people never forget what happened and to ensure something like the
Holocaust never happens again. I know that it worked for me, because I most
definitely will never forget!
