At ALA Annual in Washington D.C. - Day 2

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We had a fabulous day here in D.C.. We all slept long and well.

Our hotel serves an extended continental breakfast, and, although I modeled good balanced eating habits (e.g. hard-boiled egg, toast with peanut butter, oatmeal and fresh fruit), I’m afraid that my charges are unimpressed and insist on beginning the day with a lot of starches and carbohydrates (pastries and cereal). They will probably insist on my reporting that they did each have one segment of my orange. I told them that 5-9 fruits a day doesn’t mean 5-9 bites.

Our morning was taken up with a special presentation about resources available through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We saw a few of the new acquisitions from the photo archives and learned about how they catalog photos as well as new acquisitions from the video archives and how those are catalogued and many of them digitized and accessible via the USHMM website. We watched one video of anti-Semitic Nazi propoganda that, although it was all in German, its insidious message was clear and needed no translation. We learned about the museum’s registry of Holocaust survivors and also about the Shoah Foundation’s database of oral histories.

Then we heard from Charlene Schiff, a survivor from Poland, tell her extraordinary story about being orphaned and left to fend for herself in the forests of Poland when she was 11-14 years old. Mrs. Schiff told us that there were 5,000 Jews in her small Polish town, but at the end of the war, there were only two survivors: she and a childhood friend.

She said, “I do not know why I survived. … I feel imprisoned by my memories and my past. … But I must bear witness. … I stand here in witness. … I speak for each one of them. I cannot allow the world to forget.”

Mrs. Schiff said that she loves traveling and telling her story, especially to young people in schools. She said that she warns young people of the four I’s:
Indifference
Ignorance
Intolerance
Injustice
She said that young people are our hope for the future and that she will meet with them and talk with them as long as she is able to do so. We invited her to come to Maine.

An Inspiring Speaker and Our New Friend: Mrs. Charlene Schiff …

The USHMM is on the corner of 14th Street and Independence Ave, right around the corner from The Mall (not a mall, The Mall…). After lunch, Tess and Kayla wandered around The Mall and got lots of pictures of interesting buildings, and, of course, they checked out the local book shops and made some purchases.

Otrell and I hung out some more in the USHMM and checked out the museum shop, where we spent a chunk of money on books as well. One of the books we got was Ruth Minsky Sender’s Holocaust memoir, The Cage (Simon & Schuster, 1986).

Below is a picture of Otrell with Ruth Minsky Sender and her adult son …

The Washington Monument, located on The Mall, is encircled by 50 U.S. flags.

TRIVIA QUESTION: What do the 50 flags surrounding the Washington Monument represent?

Best wishes,
Ms McDaniel et al.

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