This morning was harrowing.  We visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum here in Jerusalem, which was something I wasn't looking forward to, I didn't enjoy, but I know it was important for me to visit and to be confronted with the reality that people are capable of doing terrible things to each other. 



6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.  It's a statistic that we probably know well, but it doesn't make the impact that it should, possibly because it's a number too huge to comprehend.  The Holocaust Museum puts names and faces to these numbers, showing people's stories of what they went through, including some who were lined up to be shot along with many others at one time, and yet somehow were missed and survived, but had to lie low among the bodies of those who weren't so fortunate. Families were ripped apart.  Some had to watch their spouses and children die, others weren't so fortunate and never knew what happened to their family members. 

At the end of the museum, there is a room in which the details of all those who were killed. Their names are in lots of books that fill this room.  There are pictures of many of them.  These people were real, they were fully human and yet they were treated so despicably in a way that no human or indeed animal deserves.
 


The part of the museum that finally brought me to tears was the children's memorial, which was filled with images of candles and the names of all those who were killed was read out.



1.5 million children were killed during the Holocaust.  That's 1,500,000.  They were never given a chance.  They werre killed because they had the wrong skin or hair colour, the wrong shaped nose, the wrong religion or the wrong family.  They did nothing to deserve the suffering that they went through, that no one should go through, let alone a child.  I wept in that memorial.  I wept for all the wasted lives and for the state of humanity that can conceive of such horrors.  I also wept because I'm aware that genocide still continues and that very little seems to be done about it.  We as Christians must pray for peace and taken what action as much as we can to ensure that the horrors seen in the Holocaust are never repeated. Never again. Please God, never again.