I was in DC earlier this week with my girlfriend as she was there attending the Romance Writers of America conference. After some thought we decided to visit the Holocaust museum on the Mall. Our concern was that the museum would be overwhelming, and it was. The degree of inhumanity on display is truly staggering. So much so that at times I found myself questioning how such a horror could have been perpetrated when I knew full well it had. I’ve read chilling accounts by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men, and others by Omar Bartov, Hannah Arendt, Eli Wiesel, and even the controversial thesis put forward by Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and still it didn’t fully register. The enormity of the loss is beyond comprehension, and the museum has worked hard to counter this by focusing on specific aspects to both humanize and give a sense of scale to what is otherwise seemingly infinite suffering.

Should you visit DC and you’re up to the challenge, I would urge you to visit and see for yourself: http://www.ushmm.org/