Today we spent the entire day at a kibbutz near where we're staying (Nahariya). This kibbutz [Lochamei Hagetaot] was founded by survivors of the Warsaw ghetto: the whole place is a museum, and we spent all day learning about the Holocaust.
Our time at the kibbutz began by being introduced to one of its members, who talked to us for a while about the kibbutz and the holocaust; and who took us on a tour of the museum. The museum had the usual photos and exhibits; but the most interesting thing in it was a large model of the death camp at Treblinka. We learnt that between 700,000 and 1,400,000 of the 6,000,000 victims were exterminated at Treblinka; and that unlike Auschwitz (the only camp that claimed more lives), less than 100 escaped, and few stayed long enough to try.
The best activity today was a talk given by an 80-year-old guy who survived the Holocaust. He told us his story about how he was born in Austria; how he and his family escaped to Belgium in 1938; how he arranged (at the age of 16!) for his family to flee the Nazi occupation and live in Vichy France in 1941-'42; and his many adventures in southern France before emigrating to Israel in 1949.
I was mesmerised by his story, in which - with a lot of luck, and a lof of friends in high places - he managed to save himself and his family from the terror of the Nazi onslaught, and eventually bring them all safely to Israel. Having lived in Austria, Belgium, France, and Israel - and having worked for a British company (Shell) as a chemical engineer for most of his life - he is now fluent in 5 languages: English; French; German; Flemish (basically Dutch); and Hebrew. Pretty damn impressive.
Following that, we had some lunch, and then went on a tour of the children's memorial part of the museum. This was constructed in a spiral, to symbolise the children's lives spiralling down into terror and death. At the bottom were videos showing the testimonies of child survivors of the Holocaust.
Our final activity at this 'Holocaust kibbutz' was with a guy who lived there, and who had been raised on one of the first kibbutzim by his parents, who made Aliyah in the 30s. He said he was part of an entire generation that never met their grandparents, since they were all murdered in the holocaust.
This guy showed us a movie called "a confession of a boy": it showed how indoctrinated the young German boys, the Hitler Youth (8 million of them!), were by propaganda in the form of songs, speeches, parades, education, and literature. As the guy said in the film: "children are like an empty vessel". Of course, the most terrifying thing is, such senseless brainwashing to hate a particular race, can and has happened again.
After the movie, we had a big discussion on whether the Nazis were monsters, or just really bad people. Of course, to call them monsters is to take the easy way out: if we dehumanise them, we try to assert that such horrific behaviour can never happen again. And it certainly can.
That was the end of our day at the kibbutz. Tonight we watched the movie "The Pianist", the new one about the Warsaw ghetto that won heaps of Oscars. It took a while to get it working: the colour was dying, so we had to replace the TV; and everyone was coughing, so we had to wait for the coughing to stop.
I haven't seen 'The Pianist' before. I wanted to see it at the cinemas, but didn't get round to it. There were some really shocking scenes, particularly when the Nazis threw an old man off a balcony; and when they shot a line of people in the head. Unfortunately, try as I might, I just couldn't stay awake through the whole thing. I missed about the last half hour of it. I'll have to see it again when I get back to Australia.
It seems that in the past few hours, my wet phlegm-filled cough has gone away, only to be replaced by an even worse dry cough that several other people in the group have. We're considering changing our name from "Academy 2" to "Hospital 2": it's just one sickness following another round here.