Day 9

Tuesday was supposed to be our last full day in Israel, but on late Monday night we got the news that our flight got cancelled, so we would leave on Thursday afternoon and not how it was planned on Wednesday morning. 

The bus picked us up at the school again and we drove to Yad Vashem, the memorial museum for the Holocaust near Jerusalem. We were excited how the day would go because none of us really knew what to expect from the day and what we will see. Our guide was a really nice woman from Switzerland who talked German with us. 

The building in front of the main museum

We didn't start the museum tour in the inside how we all expected, she started with us on the outside and we talked about the structure of the building and what the architect thought when he planned it. The building was long and a triangle from the side and had a glass top at the tip og the triangle. Amongst others the structure of the building was a symbole for the three groups that were needed for the Holocaust to happen, the ones who did it, the ones who watched it and the ones who suffered. It also looked like half a Star of David which should represent that almost half of the Jews in the world were killed during the Holocaust. The glass roof was a symbole for the hope that many people still had during WW2 and for the light that was to come at the end of everything. 

The triangle shaped museum

Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside, but it was a very instersting tour where we learned many things we didn't know about the Holocaust yet and we noticed that there were many personal stories about the people in the Holocaust. The guide told us that in Yad Vashem it's mostly about remembering the individuals the people were and not just about telling what happened. All of us were stunned by the hall that we got to see in the end, where the museum kept the memorial documents of millions of people who died in the Holocaust, but they're not nearly done with documenting all the people and with the time it becomes harder and harder to still find information about those who are still missing.

The view from outside of the museum

After the tour we had a little break and then we got to meet a very interesting and really friendly person. Hannah Pick-Goslar, the woman who entered the room and began to tell us her story, was one of Anne Frank's best friends and she had kown her since they were little children. She lived with her family in the house next to Anne and until the Franks started to hide, they went to a school together and saw each other every day. In June 1943, she and her family were deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she stayed until the end of the war in 1945. Shortly before the war ended, she met Anne, of who she thought was living in Switzerland, in Bergen-Belsen. They were separated through a fence and couldn't see each other, but they could talk. Mrs. Goslar told us that she met Anne three times in Bergen-Belsen at the fence. The first time they just talked and the other two times she gave Anne some of her food. When she went to see her a fourth time, nobody came to the fence and later she got to know that Anne had died, just a few days after her older sister. Mrs. Pick-Goslar and her younger sister were able to go back to Amsterdam after the war ended, where they received help from Anne Frank's father, the only one of the Franks family who survived. Today she lives in Jerusalem and tells her story to groups like ours. We were listening to her quietly for almost two hours and after she had ended we were all fascinated by the way she had told us her story and how it made us think about what had happened.

Our group with Hannah Pick

To do something easier to digest afterwards, we drove to a place where we had a really great view over Jerusalem and where we could take pictures of the sunset. Our bus driver was really nice and polite and went to get Falafel and Shawama for us, so we had dinner with a view over Jerusalem. 

Julia riding a camel

Jerusalem

Sunset over Jerusalem