Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach

My cultural activity took place in Miami Beach, on Thursday, October 2, 2014. On this day I decided to visit the holocaust memorial in Miami Beach. The reason why I decided to visit this sacred place is because I had no idea we had such an important memorial in Miami Beach for the victims of the holocaust, for many of us, the ideology of “lets go to Miami Beach”, is just fun, sun and partying. Personally, I learned about this place thanks to this class and the previous research to do the cultural activity. When I arrived to the memorial, parking was available, since the Miami Beach convention center is half a block away and the memorial has their own parking spots for visitors. When you start walking towards the memorial there’s a cabin, where you can purchase books, videos or make donations, & also “purchase” a $2.00 brochure that explaining the tour. The first thing that I saw when I started the tour was a statue of a mother holding her two frightened children. The tour starts with the story walls, where they show pictures of different scenarios, with a brief explanation on the bottom. Some examples of the pictures on display are soldiers cutting the beards of Jews, naked woman running before getting shoot, Jews cleaning up a street while people just observe them, piled up bodies of the diseased, people with the star that represented that they were Jews in their clothing, kids and people on the concentration camps, just to mention a few. Two pictures that impacted me the most was the picture one of a woman when she was rescued, it looked like a skeleton covered with just human skin and another one before the holocaust started where she looked healthy. The second was one taken outside of a concentration camp, where the sign outside said, “hard work will give you freedom”
Some of the practices that I noticed during my visit were different tourist, from different religions and cultural backgrounds paying respect to the victims, some of them hoping for world peace. Doing my research before visiting this memorial, I read that sometimes survivors gather here and tell their personal stories to students on a fieldtrip and help explain the pictures of the memorial based on what they lived, unfortunately I did not see anyone telling stories during my visit, as well as big group of students.
A few things that I noticed and that also caught my attention, was while walking from the wall of pictures to the list of all the names from people that died during the holocaust and through a tunnel that leads to the center of the memorial, was the voices of children singing in Hebrew, also, when you walk through the tunnel that leads to the center statue, you see the names of the major concentration camps, and at the end of the tunnel a statue of a woman/children in the floor I