Holocaust museum

Last week, I visited the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, embarrassed to say it was my first visit to a Holocaust museum. It was moving, horrific, sobering, informative, and of course, profoundly disturbing.

The picture to the right (from the Florida Holocaust Museum) is an actual boxcar (#1130695-5), which transported 100 or more Jews (and other prisoners) at a time to Auschwitz, Dachau, or Treblinka to face death. Those squeezed and stacked into these cars remained there for hours and even days. There was little air, no light, and no sanitation. Many died in this car and other cars like this one before even getting to the death camp.

The poem below was on a wall in the hallway of the museum. James E. Tokley Sr. wrote and presented it in 1997 during the dedication of the boxcar at the museum.

The Box Car, James E. Tokley Sr.

Aboard a train of no deliverance
Winding through the bitter cold
Shivering masses...hopeless waiting
Savage words that freeze the soul.

A Nazi train, apocalyptic
Bound for an unholy land
Where smokestacks belch their strange emetic.
Clouds of death rain human sand.

Inside a boxcar cut for cattle
Slave ship timber, all the same.
An alphabet of Jewish letters
Fingernailed into the grain.

You question why we should remember
Such a monumental sin.
And we reply,
To seek forever
That it happens never again.