Los Angeles Temple and Holocaust Museum

It's a tradition that whenever we visit a city that has a temple, we walk around the grounds and take photos.  We've walked around the grounds of the LA Temple before but it was several years ago.  So we went again.  Some of my favorite photos from our trip to LA were taken at the Los Angeles Temple.  I love my family and I am thankful that they are sealed to me.  I am so thankful that families can truly be together forever.

After walking around the grounds of the LA Temple, we headed to the LA Museum of the Holocaust.  I didn't think about it at the time, but in a very real way we paid tribute to my children's heritage on both sides of the family that day by visiting the LDS temple and then going to a museum to learn about the holocaust.  Many of my ancestors were pioneers and sacrificed much to live the gospel.  And Alfredo is a Jew. 

The museum was amazing.  I could have spent all day there.  It's not a very big museum but it has an audio tour and it packs a lot of information into a small space.  You go into about 8 different rooms with displays and then there are numbers you press on the audio tour to hear about the different artifacts, people and events.  Some of the audio portions describe the events/timeline of the Holocaust and WWII. Others describe artifacts from that time period.  Most tell about individuals...some survivors, some who perished in the camps or from the war.

Many parts of the museum and the audio tour brought me to tears. The two rooms that impacted me the most were a room that told stories of specific individuals who survived the camps and a room that told about individuals who worked to save and protect the Jews. 

Examples of the stars that Jews were required to wear as well as a Torah scroll.

Clothing, socks, shoes removed from Jews as they entered concentration camps.  Some of them were from very small children.

 As I mentioned, the tour brought me to tears multiple times.  But there was one room/one display that affected me emotionally more than any other.  This room was actually outside the museum.  You enter a room where there are all these holes drilled into the wall.  There's a sign that explains that each hole represents one of the 1.2 million children who died during the holocaust.  The holes are different sizes to represent the different ages.  There is a small table that had slips of paper with a photograph and a name of a Jewish child.  You could write a message or a note on the slip of paper and then you rolled it up and stuck it into a hole.  Some people had spelled out messages.  I wrote, "We will never forget."  It is so hard to comprehend the evil, prejudice, racism and hatred that had to exist to allow such a tragedy to happen (and unfortunately, this is just one of many tragedies that has occurred in recent history).  But I hope that we, as a society, can learn from this horror and prevent anything like this from happening in the future.  I fear maybe we haven't.

Love and Hope...what we need to prevent the holocaust from happening again.

After the museum visit, we had just a little bit of time before we needed to head to the airport.  We were hungry so we went to get food...Chinese food and ice cream.  The ice cream was delicious!!  (But Gabby was mad that we got one ice cream to share instead of getting individual ice creams.)

Then we headed to the airport to come back home.  It was a great trip!!