Permanent Exhibit
The permanent exhibit at the USHMM has
the world's largest collection of Holocaust photographs and artifacts,
displayed on three floors of the museum, covering 36,000 square
feet. Visitors are allowed to take their own self-guided tour
and spend as much time as they want looking at the 2,500 photographs
and 1,000 objects. The exhibit includes 53 video monitors, 30
interactive stations and 3 video projection theaters.
There are no tour guides leading large
groups and disturbing the quiet contemplation of the other visitors.
The exhibits are in chronological order, beginning with the Nazi
rise to power in 1933 and ending with the founding of Eretz Israel
in 1948. Each of the three floors of the exhibit has a theme,
starting with The Nazi Assault on the fourth floor, moving on
to The Final Solution on the third floor and ending with The
Last Chapter on the second floor. According to the museum's designer,
"the primary purpose is to communicate concepts," not
just to display objects. At the end of the tour, visitors enter
the 6,000 square foot Hall of Remembrance, which has 6 sides
symbolizing the 6-point Star of David, and the 6 death camps
where 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
As you enter from the 14th Street entrance
and walk down the hallway on the main floor, the first place
you come to on the left-hand side is the room where the elevators
to the permanent exhibit are located. To your right in this room
is a table with a box of 500 different booklets, which look vaguely
like passports, with the museum logo printed on the cover. Each
visitor is asked to select a passport, which has the name and
picture of a real person who experienced the Holocaust. As you
proceed through the exhibit, you are supposed to turn the pages
in the booklet to find out what happened to this person, whose
identity you have assumed. I visited the museum twice on two
successive days so I got two passports. I did not see any place
to turn in these booklets at the end of the tour, so I assume
that they were intended to be souvenirs.
My first passport person was a Czech
Jewish child whose parents moved to Belgium before the War. She
survived by getting false papers and pretending to be non-Jewish;
after the war she emigrated to the United States. (Her story
parallels that of America's former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright.)
My passport person on the second day
was a Polish Catholic, born in 1893, who made her living as a
school teacher. She became a resistance fighter soon after Germany
defeated Poland in 1939, and was arrested for hiding a Jewish
family. She was sent to the women's camp at Ravensbrück
in Germany, and then to Bergen-Belsen where she survived, although
she was sick with typhus. After recovering from typhus in Sweden,
she returned to her home town in Poland, where she died a natural
death years later.
On both days that I visited the museum,
I had obtained a ticket in advance so that I could enter the
exhibits at 11 a.m. I was told that this is the earliest entry
time for persons who have obtained a ticket in advance by mail
and are not part of a group. Most of the visitors to the museum
are part of a school group, and most of the groups I saw appeared
to be junior high or middle school students. The other visitors
were mostly senior citizens, but each day there were one or two
young couples carrying a baby in a backpack. On the two days
that I visited, I saw only one person that I could identify as
Jewish by his clothing and appearance.
There were a few African-Americans among
the students, but I did not see any adult African American visitors.
The visitors were predominantly white Americans, but almost all
the museum personnel were African-American. Everyone that I saw
at the museum was dressed in casual, colorful sports clothes,
not like the visitors to Holocaust museums in Europe, who tend
to dress in black from head to toe, or at least in conservative
clothes in a neutral color. The uniform of the museum personnel,
when I visited in 2000, was a navy blazer, gray slacks, white
shirt, striped tie and black dress shoes; both men and women
wore the same outfits and some of the women had their hair cut
short so that they looked like men.
On my first visit, I entered the building
at 10 a.m. so I had time to look around a little and to see a
movie, shown in the Helena Rubenstein auditorium on the basement
level, which gives an overview of the Holocaust.
There are three elevators, with interiors
made of cold hard steel, and a group of visitors enters every
few minutes, reminiscent of the Jews entering the gas chamber;
the doors close automatically and the elevator rises to the fourth
floor. Before getting on the elevator, the visitors are asked
to face the back wall where there is a small video monitor overhead,
playing a film clip which shows scenes from the American liberation
of the camps in Germany, as we hear a voice telling about the
discovery of one of the camps, probably Buchenwald. The attendant
told us that the voice is that of a famous person, but she would
not tell us who it was. My guess was General George S. Patton,
commander of the troops that liberated Buchenwald.
When the film clip ended, the elevator
doors opened, and there was a collective gasp from the occupants
as we were confronted with a huge floor-to-ceiling photograph,
about 9 feet wide. It was a picture of American soldiers looking
at some railroad tracks which were being used as a pyre to burn
the bodies of those who had died in the camp. The bodies were
not completely burned and the skulls could be easily seen. It
was a gruesome sight to the 12-year-old students who had never
seen anything like this before. The caption said that this was
the Ohrdruf concentration camp, which is a misnomer, because
Ohrdruf was a forced labor camp and a subcamp of Buchenwald,
which was a concentration camp. The corpses were identified in
the caption as "prisoners," not Jews because the forced
laborers in this camp were probably not Jewish. The placement
of this photograph is designed to give visitors the same shock
that our troops got when they first saw the camps. It also gives
Americans a feeling of pride that our soldiers fought and died
to liberate the Nazi camps before Hitler could complete "the
Final Solution."
The fourth floor is supposed to be devoted
to the years before the Holocaust started, but the exhibit starts
off with this enormous photo taken at Ohrdruf near the end of
the war and right next to it is a large color photograph of an
inmate of Dachau after the American liberation of that camp.
Next is a movie screen which continuously shows some color footage
of the Dachau camp filmed after the liberation on April 29, 1945
by Lt. Col. George Stevens, who was already a noted Hollywood
director at the time. He later directed the movie "Diary
of Anne Frank." The movie shows some of the German guards
at Dachau, with their hands in the air, including a young blond,
blue-eyed boy who faces the camera with a look of complete terror
on his face. It does not show the surrendering German guards
being shot by American soldiers, or beaten to death by the prisoners,
or the bodies of the dead guards piled up in front of the crematorium.
These introductory photographs and films are intended to immediately
make American visitors to the museum feel proud of their country's
role in freeing the Jews, and are not concerned with historical
accuracy.
From there, the exhibit moves on to show
what it was like in Germany when the Nazis first came to power.
Nazi marching music is playing in the background, and video monitors
show the torch-light parades through the Brandenburg gate in
Berlin, young blond girls giving the Sieg Heil salute to Hitler
at the annual party rally in Nuremberg, and Hitler waving to
his screaming admirers after his appointment as Chancellor. A
large photograph of a Storm Trooper holding a vicious German
Sheppard wearing a muzzle is featured in a section titled "The
terror begins." In a display case is a brown Storm Trooper
uniform with a red,
white and black Swastika arm band.
In my opinion this section on the Nazi
rise to power does not adequately convey the German nationalism
and patriotism, or the hatred of Communism, which caused the
Germans to turn into barbarians. I overheard a man standing next
to me say that "someone should have just shot Hitler."
Obviously, the display did not get across to him that in the
1930ies the majority of the German people loved and supported
Hitler, or that the Germans equated Judaism with Bolshevism,
which was their word for Communism. The Museum of Tolerance in
Los Angeles has a much better exhibit on the depth of anti-Semitism
in Germany and the street fighting between the Nazis and the
Reds, as the Communists were also called. The exhibit at the
USHMM gives the impression that it all started with the Nazi
party, and does not explain that anti-Semitism was inexorably
building up throughout Europe, starting as early as 1881 with
the assassination of Czar Alexander I, which the Russians blamed
on the Jews.
There were photographs of the German boycott of Jewish stores
on April 1, 1933, and the caption mentioned that "there
was talk of an American boycott of German goods" but didn't
say whether this boycott ever happened. Actually, an American
boycott of German goods had been declared by Rabbi Stephen Wise
on March 23, 1945, the same day that the German Congress voted
to give Hitler dictatorial powers under the Enabling Act. The
German one-day boycott was intended to stop the news stories
of Nazi atrocities which were being printed in Jewish newspapers.
Although there are some small items on
display, most of the artifacts throughout the museum are large
objects which really command your attention. As the tour proceeds,
these large artifacts gradually overwhelm the visitor with their
visual impact. For example, the first large artifact that we
see, near the start of the fourth floor exhibit, is a glass case
with a punch card sorting machine and a Hollerith tabulating
machine used to count punch cards. Both of these machines were
forerunners of the computer and were used by the Germans, who
were technically very advanced, to keep track of the Jews who
were deported to the concentration camps.
The exhibit area is dark and only the
items on display are lighted; most of the visitors inched their
way past the displays in numbed silence both times when I was
there. The whole permanent exhibit is done in a low-key serious
vein, befitting a serious subject, not like the glitzy extravaganza
at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles which uses elaborate
displays of dummies, and gimmicks that give a Disneyland quality
to the museum there. The exhibits at the USHMM are simple and
easy to understand, but they are on an adult level and do not
talk down to the visitor.
The next section of the fourth floor
exhibit is called the "Science of Race." On display
are swatches of hair in different colors, a color chart used
to classify eye color, and a caliper to measure the width of
the nose. The Nazis were obsessed with race and did a lot of
research on eugenics and genetics in an effort to improve the
Aryan race, which they called the Herrenfolk, usually translated
into "The Master Race" in English. Their definition
of Aryan included only the Nordic ethnic group of the Caucasian
race. Strangely, most of the Nazi leaders were from the German
state of Bavaria, or from Austria, and were not of the Nordic
type. Two huge posters show all the various races of the world,
according to the Nazi classification of people.
The Anschluss or unification of Germany
and Austria in March 1938 is shown in the next section, but it
is not explained that this was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles,
and that an important plank of the Nazi party platform was the
overthrow of this treaty, which was signed at the end of World
War I. Throughout the exhibit, English words are used, although
students of the Holocaust are very familiar with German words
like Anschluss, Einsatzgruppen, and Kristallnacht. The exhibit
points out that there were 185,000 Jews in Austria in 1938 when
it became part of Greater Germany. A picture of the Jews being
forced to wash the sidewalks in Vienna is shown and the caption
reads that the Jews were "humiliated" by the Germans
without saying why they were humiliated in this particular way.
Actually, the Jews were forced to scrub political slogans off
the sidewalks.
After leaving the elevator, the progression
of the fourth floor exhibit is to the left. The displays continue
around behind the elevators until you come to a red and white
painted metal pole, placed horizontally so that it is a barrier
blocking the exit near the end of the room. I noticed that some
visitors squeezed through and went around the barrier, but by
doing so they missed a significant part of the displays. The
barrier represents the border of Poland which the Germans crossed
when they invaded on September 1, 1939, but there is more to
the story before you get to that point, so you should turn left
at the barrier, where you will see a semicircular niche completely
covered with a photograph of Lake Geneva. The title of this exhibit
is "No help, No haven."
It is the story of the Evian Conference,
which President Roosevelt organized in July 1938. Representatives
of 32 countries met at a luxury hotel to discuss the refugee
problem after the Germans had taken over Austria in March and
made it known that they wanted to get rid of all the Jews. The
museum doesn't mention that the reason Hitler was particularly
concerned about Austria was because it was the country of his
birth and that he first became anti-Semitic when he encountered
Orthodox Jews on the streets of Vienna as a young man.
The Evian conference was a failure because
no country wanted to accept the Jews, but the United States did
agree to admit the full quota of Eastern Europeans and Germans
allowed by our immigration laws, which had not been done up to
that time.
The "Night of Broken Glass"
is the next section. The museum uses the Polish word "pogrom"
to characterize this event which happened on November 9, 1938.
A pogrom is a state organized or state sanctioned riot in which
Jewish property is destroyed, and the Jews are beaten and killed
in an effort to force them to leave a town or province, or in
this case, a country. The exhibit does not make it clear that
pogroms had been a regular occurrence in Europe for at least
a thousand years, and that this was the Mother of all Pogroms.
The caption says that 25,000 Jews were arrested after this night.
Most sources claim that 30,000 were arrested. Later on, in another
museum exhibit, the number is reduced to 20,000 who were arrested.
The caption mentions that the Jews were
sent to the three main German concentration camps, Dachau, Sachsenhausen
and Buchenwald, where they were released if they agreed to emigrate
quickly. This section of the display shows a large door frame
from the place where the torah was kept in a Synagogue; it has
been hacked with an axe to obliterate the Hebrew inscription
on it. A glass case shows a number of torah scrolls which were
pulled out and desecrated.
A small section called "Enemies
of the State" is devoted to the non-Jewish people who were
persecuted by the Nazis, and here there are displays about the
homosexuals and the Gypsies. "Communists, Social Democrats,
trade unionists, liberals, pacifists, dissenting clergy, and
Jehovah's Witnesses" are listed in the reading material
but no details are given and there are no pictures of them. There
was a significant number of Communists incarcerated as political
prisoners in the major German concentration camps at Dachau,
Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, but you would never know it from
seeing this exhibit. Not mentioned are the asocials, the work-shy
or the criminals who were sent to a concentration camp after
they finished their prison time for their second offense. All
these categories of people, and also the Jews, were called "enemies
of the state" by the Nazis and were put into the concentration
camps.
The museum exhibits consistently downplay
the fact that numerous Communists were sent to the Nazi concentration
camps, barely mentioning it in passing. I did not see any mention
of the fact that the policy of incarcerating the "enemies
of the state" without benefit of a trial began when thousands
of Communists were rounded up, after the burning of the Reichstag
in February 1933, and imprisoned at Dachau, the first concentration
camp.
This display says that "homosexuals
were targeted because of their sexual orientation" but doesn't
mention that there had been a law against homosexual acts on
the books since Germany became a united country in 1871. A video
monitor shows mug shots of homosexuals who were arrested but
there is no mention of the fact that they were arrested for breaking
an existing law. According to the museum, a total of 10,000 homosexuals
and a total of 220,000 Gypsies were sent to the Nazi concentration
camps. Before 1942, Gypsy men were sent to the camps under the
category of asocials because they traditionally didn't work at
a regular job.
This section includes a large Gypsy wagon,
which looks like a pioneer Conestoga wagon without the white
canvas cover. On the wagon is a violin which was owned by a Gypsy
man. Nearby is a glass case with a Gypsy woman's outfit of clothing,
consisting of a black Persian lamb jacket, a silk blouse and
a black skirt of expensive looking material. Silver bracelets
and tortoise shell hair combs are on the wall of the case, along
with a studio portrait of a well-dressed Gypsy woman. The owner
of these clothes must have owned a fancier wagon than the one
on display. Most people are familiar with the colorful painted
caravans that the Gypsies traveled around in; if one of these
horse-drawn vans could not have been found, the museum should
have at least displayed a picture of one, so that visitors would
not be puzzled by the juxtaposition of the expensive clothes
and a wagon made of rough, unpainted wood with no top.
|