The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Some Connection Required

After a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, I came out feeling that I was missing something essential: a human connection.

A few weeks ago, I went to DC on a field trip for my Master’s program. One of the focal points of the trip was the Holocaust Memorial Museum. We had spent one class talking about articles and books about the museum and learning its history so that we would be prepared to study the museum as museum professionals. Quite frankly, I was not looking forward to this part of our trip to begin with, and the reading did not make me any more optimistic.

I am sorry to say that my expectations were realized.

Perhaps one of the problems was the crowds. We got there about ten minutes before the museum opened and there was already a line halfway around the block. Add the school groups to the tourists, and the crowds grew to the point of claustrophobia. This was only exacerbated by the way the museum was designed. The first exhibit space is a long narrow hallway with exhibits on both sides. It created a bottleneck and endless frustration as people stopped to look at exhibits and held up everyone behind them. Maybe I would have had a different experience if I had gone on a day with fewer people, and, if you go, I encourage you to find an off day.

But even the removal of the crowds could not have fixed what I found to be the fundamental problem with the museum: a lack of humanity.

For a museum completely about a people’s erasure of identity, it did a very poor job establishing that identity in the first place. Visitors are taken up an elevator and dumped into Hitler’s rise to power. There is no celebration of Jewish life before the war, no way to connect to these people as people. Without that visceral connection to the victims of the Holocaust, the museum becomes a horror show, or, if you can get past the horrors, a history lesson.

There were only three places in the entire museum that I felt something like that connection. The first was the Tower of Faces, photographs from the Eishishok Shetl (the name for a Jewish village). The exhibit lines a three story tower, looking like an album plastered to the walls, and ends with a startling message: Today, there are no Jews in Eishishok.

The second place was on the two glass bridges over the main hall. The first is etched with the first names of people who died in the Holocaust while the second is etched with the names of villages that were destroyed by the Holocaust. These are easy to connect to: “That could be my name up there,” or maybe “My name is up there” and “That could be my town on this wall.”

Finally, the Identity Cards. Visitors receive a card when they enter the museum, picking from piles sorted into Male and Female. It tells the story of the person in the card as you move through the museum. The cards are often criticized because they wind up in the trash as soon as the visitor leaves the museum, but for me, the card was where I connected most; I spent most of my time in the museum wondering if the person whose life I held in my hand had survived and her presence became a constant companion through the museum.

If you get the chance, go to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Everyone should go once. But bring the personal connections with you. Learn about these people before you go. Maybe then, you won’t get wrapped up in the horrors, but rather the loss—of people, of culture, of serenity. And then you can walk out of the museum feeling the truth of their motto: Never Again.