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A Place Worth Visiting Care and thought. Those are the words that most accurately define the work of Sara J. Bloomfield (WCAS72) and hundreds of others in creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993. From the start, organizers knew they had to grapple with serious questions. First in the minds of many was, why build a Holocaust museum in the United States? Bloomfield, the museum's director since February, points out that quotations from George Washington and the Declaration of Independence greet visitors when they enter the building. "While this event happened on European soil, it really was an event that spoke to the heart of our democracy," she says. "One hopes that a visit to the Holocaust Museum reminds everyone of the importance -- and fragility -- of our democratic values." Underscoring her point is the large proportion of color photos and film footage the museum's organizers were able to compile for the permanent exhibition. Though the black-and-white material is equally affecting, it often cannot help but appear dated, from another era. But when color films flash before viewers' eyes -- scenes of Adolf Hitler at Nazi rallies that look as if they could have been shot yesterday -- the sense of immediacy is chilling. Bloomfield adds that during the early days of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the degree of emphasis on Jewish victimization was heavily discussed. But to her that wasn't in question. "Although the Holocaust was a Jewish event, it has lasting impact for all humanity," she explains. Indeed, as visitors proceed through the permanent exhibition, significant material concerns the fate of people who were not Jewish. At one point, police photos flash across a screen, an unremitting, heartbreaking parade of left-wing dissenters, Gypsies, homosexuals and others -- all murdered. Elsewhere, viewers see a photo of a smiling Helene Gotthold, a member of the persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses, with her family -- taken a few years before she was beheaded in 1944. At another point, visitors encounter artifacts from six German hospitals where an estimated 225,000 mentally and physically handicapped people were "experimented" on and killed. Yet for all this unimaginable tragedy, it was the Jews — and ultimately their systematic extermination — that was fundamental to Nazi ideology. "It's important to preserve the specificity of the thing," says Peter Hayes, a Northwestern professor of history and German who was a 1997-98 Shapiro senior scholar-in-residence at the museum. "For example, if you were gay in Prague -- unlike Berlin -- the chances were you weren't going to get in trouble unless you drew attention to yourself. But if you were Jewish, it was another matter entirely." As central as the Jews were to the Nazis' extermination policies, so have Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau and other death camps assumed a centrality in the collective postwar Jewish psyche. When visitors reach the section devoted to the camps, they are met with a somber evocation that skillfully hints at the horrors of these places. One shelf holds hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eyeglasses; others bear prayer shawls and countless umbrella frames, now just beams of rust. Nearby, canisters that actually contained the Zyklon-B gas used to kill millions lie in stacks on the floor. As a partial emotional counterweight, the saga of the Resistance and rescue efforts by non-Jews are given their due. Visitors encounter, among many others, the courageous German students of the White Rose, an underground group whose members met with cruel torture and death; the Protestants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, who secretly harbored 5,000 refugees (mostly children) from 1941 to 1944; and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who vanished forever after saving thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944 and in whose honor the plaza outside the museum is named. Bloomfield and the other museum designers agonized at times over how to present the story. In the end, they decided to let the events speak for themselves. All written explanations use simple declaratory sentences. In the disturbing but engrossing films that run regularly in several small theaters, the narration never becomes overwrought. "By and large, I think we got much of it right, and that's extraordinary," Bloomfield says. Success was far from assured in the early stages, says Miles Lerman, chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. "So many times, we were convinced we were chasing a cloud," he says, "but Sara's enthusiasm and perseverance made it a reality." -- R.F. |
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