Lessons in Faith and Humanity: Reflections from the National WWII Museum
Over Labor Day weekend of 2024, my husband and I visited the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Neither of us had visited the museum before, and we were looking forward to it a lot. We both enjoy history museums, both for the facts and for the personal accounts. I recommend this experience for everyone old enough to understand it, but the museum is made up of several buildings, and you won’t see it all in a day, even if you get there at opening and stay till closing. Wear very comfortable shoes and prepare to do a lot of walking.
The experience throughout the museum
Visitors receive a plastic card with a number printed on it and embedded in it, which they touch to a screen on a train car and at various stations throughout the museum. The number corresponds to a person’s story. By visiting a website and providing the number, the visitors can get the whole of the person’s story. That’s what makes this museum so different – the stories about the real people who lived it. Many exhibits in the museum are designed so that visitors can see in a life-sized and accurate representation what life was like during that time. This is an important thing to remember as you read through this. The history books tell us the facts of the events, but that’s only ever part of the story. The rest of the story, the story that really matters, is written in letters and in journals and in stories and in poetry and in songs. That literature tells the human side of war. War isn’t just lived on the battlefield, it’s also lived in the homes of people whose fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are fighting.
There’s a certain feeling
There are no signs asking visitors to be quiet, and yet quiet is the atmosphere. Each exhibition hall is large and full of echoes, and even with a large crowd of people, you would expect normal conversation to seem amplified. Instead, the feeling is one of almost reverence. The tour is entirely self-guided, and the exhibits are very well explained. But the gravity of the human cost is almost palpable, and almost from the first exhibit.
One quote attributed to General George S. Patton refers to the military members’ understanding of why they were there. “They may not know what they’re fighting for,” he said, “but they damn sure know what they’re fighting against.” In that era, identifying “the enemy” was an easy task for Americans.
In our current day, identifying a secular enemy seems to be somewhat less simple. Oh, on September 12, 2001, America felt mostly united against what we thought we could consider a common enemy, but as the strings began to unravel, everything we thought we knew about who was behind that attack came into question. Eighty years from now, what will the museum curators say about our time?
That moment
There’s a place in the museum where all conversation fades away to nothing louder than a whisper. It’s the area devoted to the death camps. Yes, again, there’s a feeling that comes over you that silences your voice and makes you almost stop breathing. This is history. This is fact. This is real. With the stroke of a pen, a single person sentenced six million people to death for having a particular ancestry. I don’t know how many of our fighting forces knew of the death camps or the ovens before they went overseas, but of this I am sure: nothing could have prepared them to see it. I was in a protected exhibition eighty years later and, even though I knew what happened there, I still wasn’t prepared for what I felt when I was standing there looking at the doors of one of those ovens. Knowing that those ovens were built to eradicate a portion of humanity for the crime of being Jewish.
What about this reached so deeply into my soul? I think there are two things. The first is that for some reason it was possible for one person to spread the idea that certain people were less than human. The second is that it was permissible. It isn’t just that the people of Germany allowed themselves to be swept up in Hitler’s wave of hate, but that the rest of the world didn’t have something to offer that was better, enough better, that the people Germany would reject Hitler’s wave of hate. It is of critical importance that we not allow this to happen again.
The Chaplains
There are so many things about war that have the potential to cause personal and spiritual conflict for a person that having a Chaplains’ Corps is an obvious necessity. One section of the museum is devoted to the Chaplains. I’ve heard the quote, and you probably have as well, that there are no atheists in foxholes, and, having never been in combat, I can neither affirm nor deny the veracity of that statement. From the Chaplains section of the museum, I gained a deeper appreciation for the role of a Chaplain, to help the fighting forces maintain their hold on their humanity in an environment where humanity is both the most and least valuable element.
A clergy member’s mission is also to help those under his care to nurture their faith, individually and collectively. A segment of a letter or story, I can’t remember exactly now, from one of the military members offered this advice to his readers: “Hold on to your faith. You never know when you’re going to need it.”
Why you should care enough to visit
Yes, I went way out on a limb and said that you should visit this museum. When I was growing up, my parents had a friend that had served in the First World War. Everyone I knew had a relative or family friend that had served in the Second World War. Those veterans are passing from life in the natural way of things, and it is less and less likely that you know someone today who served in that time. How will you and your children and grandchildren ever know how important it was to put a stop to the spread of that hatred? Only by hearing these stories and coming to an understanding that there are things worth fighting and dying for can we and they truly appreciate what is worth living for.
I tell my children and grandchildren stories. Nobody is writing them down, because they don’t mean anything. I’m not creating history, at least I don’t think so. Moving through time and existence, it’s possible that these words I type into my blog will become the stuff of someone’s museum curation; my journals and notes may tell the story of our time. It’s those things that create the human story of governments doing battle. It is from the letters and journals and individual stories that we understand the cost of it all. It is only by understanding the cost to humanity that we realize the price we will pay if we do not value the sacrifices that were made.
YOUR TURN
Have you visited this wonderful museum? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on it. What other museums have you visited that have evoked particular emotion or thoughtfulness for you? Drop a comment below!
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