The elderly woman looks at photographs of people who were desperate to avoid the horrible deaths which awaited them. The woman has full memory of how close she came to being a victim of mass murder when she was twelve years old.
Erika Gold walks slowly along the hallway where photographs of Jews where their hands were raised under the order of German soldiers who held the people at gunpoint during World War II in Nazi-occupied places in Europe. Gold remembers the time she and her mother faced similar scenes.
In her mid-80s now, she is a volunteer at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood. She is a survivor of the Holocaust, the plan of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews from Europe.
Gold chooses her words carefully as she walks along a corridor bearing large photographs of scenes from those horrible times. "That's why I talk about the Holocaust to the children because I feel it's important so it should never happen again," she said.
The museum is filled with stories of the lives and deaths of Jews. There is much attention placed on Cleveland, one of the major cities where to which Jews began to immigrate beginning in the 19th Century.
"We look at history through the lens of Jewish heritage and we try to connect that heritage to all people," said Ellen Rudolph, museum executive director.
