The Holocaust Museum, Porto

Yesterday we visited the Holocaust Museum. It was one of the places that I wanted to see as it was opened this year. Even though I have seen some of the images of what I saw on TV, there are other images that that I have never seen and perhaps will never forget.

When George Floyd was dying last year, I remember looking at the TV and saying "Can't we all just get along?" Yesterday I asked myself "Why can't we all just love one another? Why does it have to come to this? Why does reasoning go out the window? Why does hate multiply?"

In the images that I saw in death there was no honor. There was only disrespect and no love. I wondered, out of all of the people that I am seeing in the pictures, who were they? What type of lives did they live? How many lived? How many died? What were the stories about their lives?

Framed along many walls are the hand written applications for visas from the Jewish people who survived and came to Portugal. All wanted to get out of the continent of Europe and live somewhere else but not on Europe's soil. There were many visa requests for the United States, Haiti, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Canada and the list goes on.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is one of the places on my bucket list. No one so far wants to accompany me on this trip. Perhaps I am meant to do this journey alone. Why would I possibly want to go there? Simple. Lest we forget. I imagine it would be a profound experience for me to look at life differently, live differently, to feel the lives who were lost. To see everyone in front of me as one in the human race.