Significant Memorial Visit - Annie Jeckovich

The earliest significant memory I have of visiting a memorial was visiting the Houston Holocaust Museum on a class trip in early middle school. I have a distinctive memory of the visit’s tone- my typically rowdy class was soft-spoken and subdued.

The most vivid memory I have, and cannot place within the visit, is a picture of a girl around my age, perhaps a year or two older. I noticed the photograph, amongst the wall of photos, because two of my classmates before me laughed under their breath and pointed. In the black and white photograph, a girl stands gaunt and naked, her hair predominantly stripped from her head. The only patch of hair was between the girl’s legs, which I imagine is what evoked the laughing from my two male classmates. I remembered feeling both embarrassed, in the typical pre-pubescent manor, and angry at my classmates. I was deeply saddened by the loss of her childhood.  

The second memory which stands out from my visit to the museum was being taken out back with the guide to see one of the train cars victims were transported in. The guide told a story of a single family. In this way, the guide shifted our perspective from the grandiose, almost impossible scale of horrors of the Holocaust, to the minute. This transition evoked deep sadness within me, which is something I carried in this memory.