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We all want to shelter our kids and protect them from all the evils of the world. However, this might backfire because your children will grow up unprepared to face those realities. So, educating your offspring about both the good and bad pages in the world’s history is a necessity. World War 2 is definitely one of the hardest topics to talk about. But there are museums and memorials that will help you.
In the US, New York City is the best place to learn about this war because it houses places like:
East Coast Memorial
The East Coast Memorial is humbling and devastating and majestic all at the same time. It’s a monument that celebrates heroes that have3 given their lives for America in that awful war. 4,611 names are immortalized by this memorial, but those are only the lives lost in the west of the Atlantic.
The death toll for the World War 2 is much bigger and no place on the planet lists the names of all its victims. Millions of them from all over the world are lost to history. Seeing those hundreds of names on the memorial allows one to glimpse the enormity of this tragedy. This makes much more of an impact than reading numbers in a history textbook.
The Holocaust Museum
Another place that is guaranteed to make an impact is the Holocaust Museum in NYC. This is where your family can learn about one of the greatest tragedies of all time. The genocide initiated by the Nazis killed millions of innocent people.
One of the main advantages of letting your kids learn about the Holocaust in this museum is that it has specialized programs for children of different ages. Local guides will do the hard work of explaining what this tragedy is without traumatizing the young ones.
Brooklyn Navy Yard
A visit to the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a must to help you understand the impact that the war had on the lives of America’s civilians. Despite the fact that the majority of battles have taken place across the ocean, the Yard played an important part in this war. As you can learn from guided tours around “The Can-Do Yard”, the impact of battleships built and repaired here was huge.
70,000 people were working here building and repairing ships day and night. These people were heroes in their own right and this visit will teach a very important thing. War is a tragedy that touches everyone. It’s not only soldiers on the frontlines who suffer during it, but every layer of society has to bear this burden.
The Brooklyn War Memorial
The Brooklyn War Memorial is another site that cannot fail to impress upon people how monstrous a tragedy World War 2 was. This is the only memorial built out of the five planned by Robert Moses. The figures of a soldier as well as a woman with a child bring back the lesson mentioned above.
War touches everyone and the tragedy of it lives on through generations. Children who have to grow up without parents. Parents, who lost their children. Families and lives destroyed.
Talking about war is hard. Looking at physical reminders of it is unpleasant. And yet doing both these things is necessary.
It’s essential to teach the younger generations about this so they know to do their best to avoid wars in the future. No one wins in this kind of tragedy, and that’s the most important lesson of all.
So, take some time during your next trip to NYC to show your kids all these memorials and museums. Let them know what awful things their ancestors went through and teach them to be better people so they can teach this to their children. So no other generation knows this kind of loss.
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