Dear Friends,
Here is yet another overly late post. On October 2nd, all of us SCIO students went on a field trip to the ever sunny and happy place otherwise known as the Imperial War Museum in London. In case you can't tell, I am being totally sarcastic about the sunny and happy bit. Rather, the Museum is vastly interesting and depressing. It is sobering to walk through the five floors and through all the exhibits documenting the cruelties of war, even just war. Here are some highlights of the trip.
1.) There is an excellent exhibit called "In Memoria" about the First World War. This exhibit was especially appropriate because I was writing a paper about why most people are unaware of the World War II poets and seem to think that only the First War had a serious literary output. In the entrance to the exhibit was a quote from a poem by Vernon Scannell, who was a World War II poet, describing how, even though he did not fight in the First War, he is able to write about it, due to the poets and the landscape of No Man's Land that they immortalized in their verses. (Si denote, Scannell also wrote an excellent book about the Second World War poets called Not Without Glory, which I relied on heavily when writing my paper.) The rest of the exhibit presented artifacts from various soldiers, nurses, etc. But the poetry remained the most moving.
2.) I also journeyed through an art gallery, complete with an absolutely gorgeous painting by John Singer Sargent of World War One soldiers who had been blinded by mustard gas.
3.) I did this last, but it was probably my favorite exhibit. In the lower floor, there were mock trenches set up. It was really interesting, because it was dark and the walls of the trench loomed ominously over my head. It was eerie because there were several dummy soldiers that talked, lit cigarettes, or just stood and surveyed the whole scene. All that was missing was the mud and the gunfire. It was very realistic and chilling. I couldn't help but feel very small and alone.
4.) Before this, I had gone through the three stories of the Holocaust memorial. This was my first visit to a Holocaust exhibit and I found the whole thing entirely depressing. I felt horrified at first, and then numb after viewing so many images and reading so many stories. A few things really stood out to me. The first was an operating table that Nazi doctors used to conduct their experiments on Jewish and other unwanted peoples. I was horrified to hear of the sterilization operations performed, even on very small children. The second was the shoes that were taken from the dead Jews and then given to the ones who arrived at the camps. This recycling process was so chilling, to think of all the men, women, and children who had used those shoes. Finally, the most disturbing was the pictures, particularly one of someone bulldozing the naked bodies of men and women into a mass burial pit. Sometimes, you can know about a thing, but not really grasp that it really did happen, but these pictures revealed the absolute horror and evil of what happened during the Nazi reign. It was really too much to take in, but necessary.
In the end, the trip was good and important. It was a time to reflect on war and why we fight. Sometimes, I can't help but get idealistic and think that someday we can really just get along. And then I remember that we live in a fallen world and war will be a part of it from now until Christ comes again. All we can do is pray for peace, share the Gospel, and, when absolutely necessary, fight those who are bent on the destruction of goodness.
Here are some pictures from my visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment