The first part of the tour is the Tolerance center. In this area you can do an interactive question profile in a 1950's type cafe. You can also listen to movies about the civil rights movement, the L.A. riots, a timeline of history and tolerance problems throughout history. The last place is a movie on recent examples of intolerance ending with an approximately 14 year old girl celebrating her birthday wearing KKK clothing.
After the tolerance center you pick up a card which has the name and picture of a child on it that was alive during the holocaust. In the Holocaust center you learn more and more about what happened to your child throughout the years.
When we first entered into the center you are guided by lights that show on the box you are supposed to listen to. We were greeted by three manikins, each played an important role in understanding what truly happened during those horrible years, and getting the message out to people. They first taught us about Adolph Hitler and his party and how he came to power, we then listened to different people in a street cafe setting talking about their feelings of an impending possible war. We also learned the fate of these people. After this we moved to a room with screens on two sides of the room all showing the same thing. I didn't really get a chance to hear this part because there were three teenage boys that were being extremely rude and talking very loudly and playing pranks on each other. This became very annoying. I started thinking to myself after what we are supposed to be learning here about tolerance I certainly am intolerant of these people, I started debating with myself whether this was right or wrong.
After the doors opened we went to the next room and found out more information on our child and then moved to a diagram showing how many Jews were deported to which camps. We then learned about what Hitler had planned for all of the Jews and the horrible ideals Hitler's followers had. They showed us what it looked like to be one of the Jews not knowing where you were going, being lied too. They told them they would be working soon and free soon and other ridiculous things. They said they'd be taking a bath. We then walked into the chambers where the only bath that they would get was to be killed by the murderous Nazis. We listened to a lady tell a story of the Nazi's breaking in to a hospital where newborns were and they took all the baby's and through them out the windows onto the truck beds, killed from the fall.
After this we learned to eventual fate of the child we learned about.
The child card I was given was the story of Alfred Rothkirch. He was born in Austria in 1928 where he attended a secular school for four years. "Although his family did not observe the Sabbath, Alfred did attend a synagogue with his father on holidays." It told me that he liked the violin and enjoyed studying English. "After the Anschluss in March of 1938, Alfred's family began to make preparations to flee Austria." He boarded a "Kindertransport" which was a rescue effort put on to bring children from the affected countries to England. He arrived there were he was taken in by an English Jewish family. When the war started England thought it was best to move the children out of the best cities and moved him to Walpole St. Peter. He was taken in by the Parish family. During this time his mother immigrated to England and worked for a Jewish family in London as a housekeeper. "In 1940 Alfred and his mother immigrated to the United States with the help of an uncle living in Chicago." Alfred's father tried fleeing Austria to his family and boarded a transport ship to Palestine. The boat caught fire and his father was stranded on an island called Rhodes. He was then taken to Palestine until 1945 when he moved to the US with his family.