The trip to the Holocaust Museum and the African American museum in Washington, D.C. was more than just educational. The experience taught me about morality.

Of course, most of us know what happened in the Holocaust, but there’s so much more than just the narrow confines of the history textbooks.

We read stories of events that occurred with specific details that were hard to imagine. We saw pictures of real people that were affected by the horrors of racism and slavery. Receiving an identity card in the beginning of the museum and following someone real through was heartbreaking. I was that person. It’s different to see the life of someone get taken away from them then just reading about it online.

In more details, there was certain sections from the museum that really made me tear up. I viewed life differently. For example, pictures of the hair they shaved off and used it for pillows and mattresses just disgusted me that they took absolutely everything from them.

Yes, even the hair.

One of the main parts of the museum that made me feel sick was the shoe display. Knowing that so many people were killed and seeing it in front of me was just such a different feeling. All I could imagine was that some of those shoes belonged to mothers or fathers or kids or grandmothers.

We also saw how the Nazis dismembered bodies and used them for experiments. The museum had pictures of the machine and some of the bodies. They had a rail train and a small figurine of how the camp looked. There was a quote from a lady that showed she pushed her kids out of the gas chambers so they could live and it broke my heart that she was even put in that situation.

The museum showed how Hitler took power through the years and some of the graphic things he says in his speeches and the events leading to the killings. The museum also showed our role in it and how we reacted. (The US had a quota on Jewish immigrants and ships like the MS St. Louis with 900 refugees that had to turn back).

The museum also talked about the other prisoners like the effects of the ill and handicapped, the gypsies and the homosexuals.

In the African-American Museum, I didn’t see much of a difference in what the US did to the African-Americans and how Hitler treated the Jews in the early years. Not only did the United States dehumanize them, but the US has been torturing and harassing and breaking up families of the African-American community for centuries now.

The museum also showed how our government is hypocritical because of how we treat African-Americans on a Christian-based reasoning and then writing in the constitution that all men are equal when in reality that’s not the case.

The Emmett Till memorial was the hardest to go through because seeing a mother so distraught over 14-year-old boy that was murdered by two white adult males was beyond me that we can even let this happen in our country that what we are supposed to stand for is not true at all.

It taught me that we should have been really ashamed of what United States has done to the African-American community. It is still sad. Whether they want to believe it or not.

How could human beings justify such horrors? How could it have gone on for so long?