FIELD TRIP: Candles Holocaust Museum

A uniform for a male prisoner at Auschwitz.

Yesterday, we traveled to Terre Haute, Indiana, to visit the CANDLES HOLOCAUST MUSEUM. It was really interesting. It was founded by EVA KOR, a Holocaust survivor. She, and her 8 year old twin sister, Miriam, were one of the Mengele Twins. 

Josef Menegle was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who planned and supervised experiments that were done on over 200 sets of twins. One twin acted as a "control" while the other one was injected with different substances to see how they reacted.

Josef Mengele

Eva and Miriam are pictured on the left as young girls. The other two photos are of their two older sisters.

The entire family was forced to ride in a crowded cattle car for 3 days with no provisions. They were lied to and not told where they were going. They ended up here. This is the entrance to the concentration camp. One track took all the twins and other "selected" Jews to one area. Another track took the remaining Jews to be put to death in the gas chambers.

A photo of several Mengele Twins. They were forced to sit naked while waiting to be experimented on. Eva and her sister were only 8 years old when they were brought there.

After the war, the 14 year old girls went to live with an aunt who also survived. The girls' parents and sisters had not survived.

The girls later immigrated to Israel and joined the Israeli army.

Both sisters found love, married, and started families of their own. Miriam stayed in Israel, while Eva ended up making her home in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Eva's sister had poor health for many years, due to the experiments that were done on her. She eventually needed a kidney transplant (which Eva provided for her), then ultimately died of progressive bladder cancer. Eva was devastated by Miriam's death, but wanted to do something positive in her memory. So, in 1995, she opened the CANDLES Museum and Education Center.

For the first part of our visit, we walked around the museum looking at the photos and displays.

Then, for the last part of our visit, we were privileged to sit and listen to Eva as she told her story. She is now 85 years old.

We were able to get our photo taken with Eva.

This last photo is a bit blurry, but we asked to see the tattoo on Eva's arm. Every prisoner who came into the camps was forced to have a number tattooed on their arm. The numbers on Eva's tattoo were hard to make out now, due to age and skin condition, but it was still evident that a tattoo was there. Eva knew those numbers by memory and told us what they were.

If you get a chance to stop in at this museum, I encourage you to do that. Eva is not only a Holocaust survivor, she is an advocate for FORGIVENESS, and is known to help people in finding their own path to self-healing. Her story is riveting and inspiring.

"Anger is a seed for war, forgiveness is a seed for peace."  ~ Eva Kor

BIOLOGY 101: Egg Experiments & An Owl Pellet Dissection

As we studied Flying Creatures with our Biology 101 DVD curriculum, we added activities from Kit #29 (Eggs), and Kit #30 (Owls) from The Young Scientist Series - Set 10. 

What happens to a raw egg when it is placed into a bowl of hot tap water? Bubbles begin to form, due to tiny spores in the egg shell. See the short video below for an example.

When you have a hard-boiled egg, and a raw egg, which one spins faster and longer? Take a look at this next video. The hard-boiled egg is white, and the raw egg is brown. 

In this photo, JJ is getting ready to dissect an owl pellet. In case you were wondering, an owl's stomach cannot digest the fur, bones, teeth, feathers, and insect shells that come from the critters it eats. So, these “extra” parts are formed into a tight PELLET inside the owl, and are later spit up. The pellet JJ is about to dissect has been disinfected and wrapped in aluminum foil until it is ready for dissection.

The unwrapped pellet. It is mostly dark brown, but you can see a small white spot, which is either feathers or fur.

He found this small skull inside of the pellet.

After he gathered all the bones, we put them in bleach water to clean them up, and JJ began to place them on this diagram of a rodent.

He was able to find about 90% of the bones that can be found in a rodent. He also found some very tiny skulls, which we think may have been unborn babies from inside the rodent's mother. It was interesting to see.

Now that we've finished the Flying Creatures section, we are moving on to learn about Land Animals. 

BIOLOGY 101: Aquatic Creatures & A Brine Shrimp Hatchery

In our Biology 101 course, we finished the section on Aquatic Creatures.

To supplement the video lesson, JJ also read the material in the Guidebook, and watched videos on You Tube about different aquatic animals, such as whales and sharks. We also took a virtual You Tube field trip to a pond and identified the living creatures in it, such as tadpoles, water bugs, and mosquito larvae.
 

For a LAB, we hatched some brine shrimp, using Kit #29 in The Young Scientist Series.

Here, JJ is cutting an empty sodapop bottle in half to use as the hatchery.

Following the directions, he added the tiny shrimp eggs to the prepared salt water.

We placed the hatchery on a kitchen counter under a light to help keep the water warmer.

In a few days, the shrimp hatched and began to grow. This is a photo of some of them a couple of weeks after they hatched. 

The shrimp are drawn to the light for some reason. Here is a short video of them swimming towards  a flashlight in a dark room . . .

That concluded our Aquatic animal study. We also just finished the section on Avian (flying) creatures, and will post about that soon.