My business trip to DC was book-ended by visits to two of the areas many excellent, free, museums and galleries. On the morning of my first day I walked  past the White House and the Washington Monument to the Holocaust Museum. The last morning I took the Metro to the National Gallery. From the Sorrow and the Pity to looking at the sunlight on the water through the eyes of the Impressionists, I visited two superb locations. If you are in DC and can make time to visit either – do so.

The Holocaust Museum

Is simply one of the most remarkable buildings in the western hemisphere. It’s both a vital testament to man’s inhumanity to man – lest we forget- and an immersive experience in the darkest days of the last century.

The building fulfills the architects promise to "take you in its grip". The visitor experiences every aspect of the horror of the Nazi state’s final solution. I left the building a different person than when I entered. The very cells of my being absorbed more than I can comprehend or ever hope to articulate of  the unspeakable horror and scale of the Holocaust.  Words alone cannot do justice to the monstrosity Hitler visited on the world.  The museum impresses the truth of the events that lie beyond words, beyond rhetoric.

We see the propaganda posters and hear the radio speeches and marching songs that accompanied Hitler’s rise out of the hopelessness of Weimar Germany. The classroom textbooks on eugenics and all the scientific rationalism that explained theories of the Master Race to young and old. Some pen and ink graphs bore a chilling resemblance to the worst Power Point slides of today – bar-charts legitimizing the obsessive statistics of racial superiority or justifying calls for re-armament. It was apparent that the Nazi’s were, in their era, accomplished communicators. Goebbels gave away radios (can you hear me now?). Hitler did not have a speechwriter. The poison was all his. He was the world’s most successful  motivational speaker whose call to action killed millions.

We see the results of his speeches in the floors of the museum that show the move from straightforward bullying brutality and persecution to the full-scale machines of death built and operated at Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek.

It forced me to face up to the horror of this era. It is beyond the banality of evil; beyond the room of slate grey shoes abandoned at the gas chamber doors; beyond the piles of toothbrushes, razors, spectacle frames, hair brushes; beyond the photographed mountains of human hair shorn from the victims; beyond the names of the disappeared villages etched on window and wall; beyond the gates to the ghetto; beyond the railroad car (where I broke down and cried); beyond the identity cards and the systems of classification by yellow, purple, black and pink triangles; beyond the efficient Hollerith data-processing machines stamped with the initials IBM; beyond the documented indifference to all of this by the American politicians of the 1940’s.

It is the creepy suspicion that all this could happen again, and again, and again, and again. It’s Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, Darfur. It’s the pages of history waiting to be written with names we have not yet heard. Yet someone, someday, might start the ball rolling again with a few clever words spoken with passionate intensity to ignorant listeners desperate to believe:

The National Gallery of Art

After the darkness, light. A treasure trove of all that is good and great about mankind. Of all that survives the darkness and despair. I paid homage to Renoir, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne and Pollack:

I said hello to beauties from another era:

To Ellen, at the cafe table, lost in thought over her brandy-soaked plum:

To Victorine, by the Railway Bridge, heralding the modern era:

To the slaves to love:

To those lost in quiet domesticity:

Rain was turning to snow as I left Washington, to fly home to California, baking under a February sun.