Stones forever, flowers die. In memory of the Holocaust.

Memories Best Forgotten, But Will Never Be!
Yad Vashem is a reminder of a cruel past from generations ago, that will live on for generations to come. Farzana Contractor spends some quiet moments there

I have read too many Leon Uris books as a young girl and seen too many movies on the Holocaust as a young adult to be in Tel Aviv and not go visit the Yad Vashem museum. It�s a place that reminds the world of the insane, inhuman acts of atrocities and barbarism meted out to the Jewish people of the world by a creature who went by the name of Adolf Hitler.

Yad Vashem is the second most visited site in Israel after the Western Wall. It is a huge complex, very artistically conceptualized and ironically for what it is depicting, a rather beautiful place too. Sadly beautiful.

Visitors enter the place by walking along a tree-lined avenue of the �Righteous among the Nations�. Each tree is representative of non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jewish people during the Holocaust. Among them is a tree planted by Oscar Schindler, made famous by the book and the film Schindler�s List.

The Historical Museum is the main feature of the site. It tells chronologically the despicable story of the Holocaust through a series of inter-connected rooms. Walls that are covered in huge black and white pictures, genuine artifacts from concentration camps, including letters and books, with sensitive text explaining in detail how it all was. The text is in Hebrew and English.

Entrance to the Yad Vashem Memorial.

Many years ago I had visited the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany and I was so traumatized, I lost respect for mankind. That such acts had been allowed to happen by a world which stood by and watched was beyond me. I had cried then, and I cried now after I went into the Children�s Memorial. There are names listed of children who had been transported to concentration camps and killed. It was killing to walk there now. Why could the children not have been spared? Try imagining even one child from your own family undergoing even the smallest of pain and see your own reaction!

Further into the Memorial, it was pitch dark, I heard a voice and saw only a smallglimmer of light, with mirrors all around, with lit candles in the center. In the still of the darkness the solemn voice stated the children�s names, their ages and when they died in the camps, one after another. Heart-breaking!

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FARZANA CONTRACTOR