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In the Service of Memory
| Article
# : |
10935 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
3,184 Words |
| Author
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Edward R. Linenthal
Edward T. Linenthal is professor of religion and American
culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Author of
Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields, he is now
finishing a history of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum project. |
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stands adjacent to the Washington Mall and within the "monumental core" of he nation's most sacred soil. As visitors move through the museum's permanent exhibition in the Hall of Witness, they will confront the story of the Holocaust through film, oral history, photographs, and artifacts. The museum's memorial space--the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance--is both a place of mourning for the dead and a place of reflection on the contemporary legacy of the Holocaust.
The museum's "journey" into the world of the Holocaust begins as each visitor receives an identity card of a person--of the same age and gender--who was a victim of the Holocaust. This card, reminiscent of the actual identification papers that Jews and others considered undesirable by the Nazis were required to carry, is updated throughout the exhibition until, finally, museum goers learn the fates of their "companions."
As they travel by elevator to the beginning of the permanent exhibition on the fourth floor, visitors hear a description of the liberation of an extermination camp from an American soldier. The exhibit begins with the scenes of the Holocaust that so shocked veterans when they entered the camps.
The fourth floor then details the gathering storm in Europe from 1933 to 1939; the third floor--on which the universe of the death camp is graphically portrayed--focuses on the years of destruction, 1939-1944; and the second floor introduces visitors to the period from 1944 to the survivor's journey to freedom in Israel and the United States.
One of the most moving spaces in the museum is a memorial to the Lithuanian village of Ejszyszki, one of many Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis. Housed in a tower, the memorial is connected to the rest of the museum by bridges evocative of the ghetto bridges in Lodz, Poland. Visitors enter the space on two different floors, to view enlargements of Yaffa Eliach's extraordinary collection of photographs of what was once her hometown. Eliach (director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Brooklyn College), who as a small child barely escaped execution by the Nazis, vowed later to do whatever she could to document the prewar life she loved and collected thousands of photographs of this village.
In the Ejszyszki memorial, we see the faces of fifteen hundred Jews killed in September 1941. Scenes of smiling friends, people at play, walking, engaged in living, remove them from the
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