The United  States Holocaust Memorial Museum is one of America’s sacred spaces. From the moment one enters, there sits an unusual quiet. To enter the museum’s galleries, you are given an identity card, like those in the concentration camps. You are ushered into an elevator which echoes those of concentration camps. In various places, you walk through a sea of shoes left by those killed in the camps. You walk through a train car which took Jews and others to the camps. You view actual concentration camp shirts marked with the yellow star, for Jews, the pink triangle, for gays, and various other emblems to distinguish the Nazi’s murderous categories.

My experience there is unlike that at any other museum. There often exists a kind of reverence. You are walking  through an actual train car that once held so much suffering. You are viewing actual shoes left by those going to the gas chambers. There is not the typical “tourist place” chatter. In moments like these, one is only left with silence.

Today, there was a shooting in this very space. Of course, there are shootings everyday in America. People are killed daily in liquor stores, on street corners, in churches, mosques, and synagogues even. While we rarely hear of murder in a museum, we cannot really be surprised.

A couple of years ago, I went to a lecture series at the Holocaust Museum, about the situation in Darfur. One evening, during the lecture series, they showed slides on the outside wall of the Museum, all images from Darfur. It was people’s faces mostly. The elderly, children, smiles, sorrows, games, all the human reality one would expect. The slide show was flashed onto the dark red brick section, shown in the top left of the photograph above. It was during this slide show, and prompted by the lectures I had heard, that I sought to give voice to some of what I learned. This resulted in a series of five poems called “The Darfur Poems.” Two are in the poetry section of this website. All of them are in “The Potomac Journal,” also noted on the Publications page of this website.

There is so much hatred in America, the world. There is so much misunderstanding and even at times, a desire not to understand others. There is also, of course, such easy and self-righteous access to guns that we can never be surprised by violence in this country. Not even violence in a place that seeks to say: “Never Again.”