My 2023 DMVNE #OLASTEOmoment
I want to start by saying how grateful I am to have been chosen to participate in the 2023 OLASTEO DMV National Excursion. I made so many incredible memories and friendships in the few days we spent in D.C. and none of that would be possible without the OLASTEO team and the donors who helped make this experience possible.
I enjoyed all the beautiful monuments, museums, and history D.C. offered. My OLASTEO Moment happened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At the start of the day, I knew that it would be a very emotional experience when we got there, considering how great of a tragedy the Holocaust was. Through the first few exhibits, I was shocked by the extent of the genocide. I learned about it in my history class while covering World War II, but this museum went into much more detail about the horrors of everything that occurred.
More specifically, my OLASTEO Moment was during the part of the museum where we sat down and listened to the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors. It was heartbreaking to hear about the inhumanity of what happened to Jewish people. While reading about the atrocities in books or the other exhibits was upsetting, I think that hearing the fear and emotion in their voices made it so much more tragic. I felt connected to the people recounting their stories, as well as a great deal of sorrow. While I am grateful I will never experience what they did, it was an eye-opening experience to hear exactly what went on inside the concentration camps from the survivors themselves.
As I continued through the museum, I encountered a part where visitors could pick up an iPad and scan pictures of Jewish families on the wall. Once scanned, you would read about the families' lives before the Nazi invasion. It was gut-wrenching to see how these families had lives just like mine and then had it ripped away from them in a matter of minutes. The diversity of the world should be embraced, no matter what skin color, religion, or gender we all are. So the Nazi party dividing humankind into “superior” and “inferior” races was utterly wrong. As I mentioned initially, OLASTEO helped me create memories and friendships. But it also helped me to embody what OLASTEO stands for, understanding each other and feeling a sense of unity with everyone we meet and all their stories.
