The Museum of Tolerance was established with the goal of educating people about the Holocaust and encouraging them to combat all forms of discrimination and prejudice in the contemporary world. The museum is located on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. It is a breathtaking place, which I visited as part of my course program. I attended several exhibits: one was devoted to the Holocaust, another was focused on Anne Frank, and the third one dealt with tolerance issues in daily life. This experience has enriched my knowledge of history and raised my awareness of the importance of advocating for cultural diversity and human rights.
The museum exhibits are closely related to human rights issues. The Holocaust exhibit demonstrates how Jews were deprived of their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and safety. It further suggests that this historical event is still relevant in the modern world because it points to the need to fight for human rights and suppress any attempts to violate them. In particular, Hitler’s letter exhibited at the museum showed that Hitler had expressed a strong distaste for Jews years before he came to power. However, no one ever came to stop him, and his ideas were spreading freely in German society, allowing the Nazis to take power and commit atrocities stemming from racial and cultural differences. People should learn a lesson from the past and fight any manifestations of intolerance, such as hate speech, to secure human rights for every individual.
Nothing during the visit disappointed me, and two particular things impressed me the most. The first thing is that, at the museum, each visitor is given a card with a name of a Jewish child. Further, the life story of this child is told, which includes the horrors this person experienced under the Nazi regime. This exhibit made me feel as if I lived this child’s life, and it was a painful experience because I realized that no one deserved to go through such atrocities and die in suffering. Another impressive experience occurred when I approached two doors, one of which had the sign “prejudiced,” and the other – “unprejudiced.” The latter suggested that the visitor should think and choose the other door. This experience was sobering because I realized that none of us is free from bias, and we should do our best not to let our prejudices corrupt our behavior.
The takeaway I got from the information is that Holocaust was an appalling episode in human history, bringing suffering and death to many people based on their ethnicity. Although I knew from history lessons that millions of Jews fell victim to the Nazi regime, the museum experience showed me the personal stories hiding behind these numbers. The takeaway I got in terms of messaging is that every person’s efforts can make a difference in the fight against discrimination and prejudice. Working together with others and hearing other individuals’ perspectives can help people find creative solutions to pressing societal issues, such as homelessness, immigration, and hate.
I would recommend others to experience what I have felt in this museum because the exhibits made me realize the importance of tolerance and diversity. In the museum, I saw the broken lives resulting from discrimination and intolerance and the struggles of activists aiming to achieve equal civil rights for everybody. As for the prompt that I would give to other visitors, I would ask them to write about their own prejudices that came to their minds when viewing the exhibits. I think that recognizing and admitting one’s biases is the first step toward eliminating them.