How We Learn About the Holocaust

As a 12-year-old in the summer of 1965, I went to Soviet-Bloc era Warsaw with my parents and brother. It was 20 years after the end of World War II. I saw a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto in front of "a patch of hilly land with two trees," as I described it in my trip diary from the time. "Today nothing much that was exciting happened, and mainly because there isn’t much old stuff to see because it was reduced to rubble" -- I spelled it "rubel" -- "in World War II." The exhibits at what I described as a "Jewish Museum" spared nothing. "Every picture was grimmer than the one before, showing the bones and the people with stars on their chests. We came out as sober as if we were going from a funeral."