Yad Vashem

This morning, I joined one of our buses on their visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Shoah memorial. A new museum opened a year ago, and even though we've had 90 (!) buses here since then, this was my first time to the new museum. We spent about 2 hours on a guided tour and it would have been very easy to spend another few hours going through again to see all of the things that our guide couldn't or didn't cover.

There was one picture, that from all that I saw, was probably the most disturbing. It was 4 or 5 German soldiers (police, SS?) laughing as they cut off the beard of an old Jewish man. I just can't imagine what posesses people to enjoy themselves as they intentionally strip the dignity of another person. There were obviously all sorts of other, very disturbing images, but this one was especially unnerving.