Holocaust museum

Holocaust museum, any of several educational institutions and research centres dedicated to preserving the experiences of people who were victimized by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust (1933–45). Among the victims were Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Christians who helped to hide Jews, and people with physical and developmental disabilities. Notable examples of Holocaust museums include Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Holocaust museums in Israel and Europe

In the years following World War II, initial efforts to record the crimes of the Nazi Party began in the newly formed State of Israel. The first of these institutions, the Ghetto Fighters’ House outside of ʿAkko, Israel, was founded by Holocaust survivors in 1949. Exhibits centred on the theme of resistance, showcasing both Jewish life before the Holocaust and Jewish agency in the face of Nazi aggression. In addition to exhibiting Jewish artworks, photographs, and writings, it also featured a scholarly archive accessible to the public. A second museum, Yad Vashem, was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 as the world centre for Jewish Holocaust remembrance. Both museums continued to expand into the 21st century. Another very early museum of the Holocaust was the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. Inaugurated in 1956, the memorial has since expanded its exhibitions and developed a vast collection of archival resources.

In addition to new museums constructed to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, several historical sites in Europe were restored and preserved in the years following World War II. Former Nazi concentration camps were gradually opened by survivors or by the governments of their respective countries so that visitors could glimpse the sites of the tragedy for themselves. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, located outside the town of Oświęcim, Poland, was organized by former prisoners of the notorious camp. When it opened in 1947, visitors could view for the first time the gas chambers, burning pits, and crematoriums used to murder hundreds of thousands of people. In the same year, the Terezín Memorial opened in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) at the site of the former Theresienstadt camp. The Buchenwald Memorial (1958), Sachsenhausen National Memorial (1961), and Dachau Concentration Camp and Memorial Site (1965) were later opened in Germany. Buildings used by Nazis as detention and deportation centres, such as the Dutch Theatre (Hollandsche Schouwburg) in Amsterdam, were also opened to serve as memorials and museums. Although these sites differ markedly from traditional museums in that the buildings themselves serve as the exhibits, most also contain such tangible items as possessions taken from prisoners as they entered the camps, written records kept while the camps were in service, and clothing and shoes removed from prisoners just before they were killed.

Private homes used to conceal people during the Holocaust were also opened to the public. The Amsterdam home where Anne Frank and her family hid for two years during the German occupation of the Netherlands was opened as a museum in 1960. In France the Memorial Museum for Children of Izieu was opened in the Maison d’Izieu, a private home where Sabina and Miron Zlatin concealed more than 100 children from the Nazis between May 1943 and April 1944. The home opened as a museum in 1988.

Holocaust museums in North America and elsewhere

Beginning in the 1960s, survivors outside of Europe and Israel also took steps to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust—the first of such institutions in the United States—was founded by a group of survivors who met in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) class in Hollywood in 1961. The museum’s first exhibit consisted of survivors’ own mementos, written records, and photographs. In the 1970s and ’80s other museums were founded in El Paso, Texas; Farmington Hills, Michigan; San Francisco, California; and Buffalo, New York; as well as in Montreal, Canada; and Melbourne, Australia. In the 1990s, at the approach of the 50-year anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, there was renewed interest in establishing institutions to memorialize, research, and educate. Around the world several more Holocaust museums were founded, including the Fundación Memoria del Holocausto (1993) in Buenos Aires, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993) in Washington, D.C., the Cape Town Holocaust Centre (1999) in South Africa, and the Holocaust Education Center (1995) in Fukuyama, Japan. Later constructions include the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center (2002) and, near Chicago, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (2009).

Holocaust museum architecture and contents

Architects of many of these modern museums sought to imbue their new spaces with symbolism and significance. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American architect James Ingo Freed created a space intended to render the visitor slightly off-balance and on edge. The Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, with a new wing designed by István Mányi, resides in an asymmetrical building with dislocated walls, which are intended to symbolize the “distorted and twisted” era of the Holocaust. Architect Stanley Tigerman’s design for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center divided the building into “dark” and “light” sections. Visitors “descend into the darkness” to view exhibits revealing the horrors of the time period. They then view a Book of Remembrance with the names of the victims at the centre of the museum before exiting through a portion of the building filled with natural sunlight that symbolizes the time of rescue and renewal.

Beginning in the 1990s, Holocaust museums, as well as organizations independent of them, have organized vast digital collections to archive information about the victims and survivors. Perhaps the largest and best-known of these collections is sponsored by Yad Vashem; visitors to its Web site can view a database of victims’ names and outcomes, as well as an online photo archive. The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands has an interactive map illustrating all known records of Dutch Jews involved in the Holocaust. In the United States the Fortunoff Video Archive, on the campus of Yale University, owns more than 4,300 videotaped interviews with Holocaust witnesses and survivors, and the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History at the University of Southern California has archives containing tens of thousands of interviews.