Police officers solemn on museum tour
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL /
WASHINGTON — The room full of people in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was remarkably quiet.
There they were, more than 50 police officers from Columbus, gazing in silent horror Tuesday at the brutal images of Auschwitz, the photo of a Nazi soldier shooting an unarmed Jewish man in the head, and the black-and-white photos of smiling Eastern Europeans before their arrest for simply being Jewish.
“It hits you hard,” said Columbus Police Sgt. Charlie Waldenga. “You are in shock.”
Carol Goodman, a museum volunteer who led one group of officers past the twisted images of the Holocaust, said “it’s a hard museum to go through,” adding everyone “is quiet because it is a very sobering part of history.”
And while the trip had been planned long before a white supremacist was charged with murdering a young woman this month in Charlottesville, Virginia, the timing could not have been better as the nation grapples with rising racial tensions.
“It’s probably a reminder that we need to be extra cautious in any age that there is a possibility it could happen again, and it’s our duty to make” certain that the horrifying history from World War II is never repeated, said Waldenga, who was making his third visit to the museum.
For more than two hours, the officers were guided by a handful of volunteers through the museum, part of a two-day trip the officers are making that will include a stop Wednesday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture before busing back to Ohio.
Tuesday, they saw chilling films of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and still photos of SS Officer Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and the other architects of a coldly deliberate policy that led to the deaths of 6 million European Jews. They could see Julius Streicher, the sadistic publisher of the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, which was the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party.
To Officer Matthew Serror, the museum was a vivid reminder of what happens when angry words spiral out of control, saying the Holocaust “started out as just words, but then those words turned into action which led to this.”
Serror said, “while we are in a society of free speech with a First Amendment which needs to be supported,” people need to understand that “words can lead to action.”
“The actions that follow those words is really where you are at a fork in a road,” he said. “You decide to take those words and turn them into actions of hate that lead to (the) destruction of mankind, or you decide to turn it into an action of going the opposite way.”
Officer Kelly Kasser, who struggled to control her emotions, said the experience will make her a better police officer. “I don’t see how it couldn’t help.”