A Holocaust museum near the town of Wittstock, Germany was badly damaged after being firebombed, and ignorant profanities left scrawled on the rubble.

Luckily, the quick action of the local police helped stop the fire, saving almost half of the building and its exhibitions. But enough damage was done to show that there are people who still want to prove that the Holocaust was all a lie.

The sentence “Jews have short legs,” was scrawled in pink, along with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti.

With all the raw and obviously real artifacts found in the past years, I don’t see how anyone could possible be so blind as to still believe it was all a lie. It seems impossible to ignore the brutal truth about Nazi Germany and its leader.

I think the people who committed this crime know that the Holocaust was a true event, but are ashamed of their country’s actions or are too cowardly to speak out about the issues surrounding the Holocaust in a public way.

How could anyone be so shortsighted as to think the destruction of a single museum would change the world’s views of the Holocaust? It is appalling. The museum was not just an archive of one of the most horrific events in Germany, but was built specifically to remember the thousands of lives taken in 1945, during one of the final Nazi death marches. Just days before all the concentration camps were liberated by American and Soviet troops.

This march was the Nazi’s final and desperate attempts to move their prisoners further into Germany, in an effort to hide their unthinkable acts of injustice and cover up their lies.

After visiting a three-story Holocaust museum in Colorado, I found myself unable to rid my mind of the unbelievable, and often terrifying, sights I encountered within the building’s walls. After five hours of trying to assimilate the amount of information and artifacts in a single museum I was forced to leave.

It was all too overwhelming.

The thing that touched me the most was a huge glass box that held thousands of eyeglasses left behind after the owners were ruthlessly killed by starvation, gas chambers, or over-exhaustion.

Humankind needs to remember that this horrendous event did indeed happen, and we need to learn from it and educate ourselves enough so that history never repeats itself.

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