Moral Choices for the Future

All my life I have been learning from different experiences, but this one stood out. This year my 8th-grade class went to the LA Museum of Tolerance. We were taught by a man named Walter. He warned us of the things we would see, hear, and feel. Before we started, each person got a card with the name of a child who had either lived or died in the Holocaust. At the end of the day, we would find out whether they lived or died. As I was reading about the little girl on my card, my eyes immediately went to her birthday, January 27 which is just four days apart from mine and was just around seven years old when she was interned. He taught us about the Holocaust and the terrible things that humans can do to each other. As we walked through the museum the thing that stood out to me the most was when we walked through the simulated gates into the gas chamber. As we stood outside the gates, I started to get scared even though they weren't real. I wondered how people could even think of locking up another person just for their religion. Walter, our guide, taught us about our responsibility as the future generation, he told the reason we were there learning about our history. The reason we were there was to learn from past human mistakes and make a different choice in the future.  He wanted to make sure that nothing as terrible as the Holocaust happened again. By going to the Museum of Tolerance, not only did I learn more about the world’s history, but I learned more about moral choices. At the end of the tour, I was heartbroken to find out that the little girl I had on my card had died from starvation in Auschwitz.

“Let us not forget, after all, that there is always a moment when the moral choice is made. Often because of one story or one book or one person, we are able to make a different choice, a choice for humanity, for life.”  - Elie Wiesel. I don’t want another holocaust to happen. Never again do I want a little child to be locked up and forced to have a slow death for something they can’t control. Going to the Museum was what taught me more about moral choices. I will forever remember seeing the propaganda photos showing the Jews as rats, the gas chamber simulation, and the pictures of the dead bodies piled on top of each after being gassed to death. The moral choices in made in the past were not good, so for the future, I want to make moral choices that will help the people in the world not hurt them.