Deluge and Holocaust Museum

Early yesterday morning everyone got a Flash Flood Emergency alert on their phones, warning we could get an inch of rain in the span of 30 minutes, and shortly before we were due to meet at the bus pick-up spot, the rain started coming down, hard. I decided to head over there early, since the bus has been idling and waiting for us in advance in the past. I wore my sneakers (the only closed-toe shoes I brought), but they turned out to be no help at all--the entire Georgetown campus had turned into a series of lakes and rivers, seemingly instantaneously! My socks were waterlogged before I'd made it halfway to the main gates, where I spotted a very small rat fleeing the destruction. The steps at the main gates were a literal waterfall of gushing water. I've never seen anything like it, much less something I had to walk through (cursing all the while). I made it to the bus stop to find no bus, but Celeste and Laurie perched on top of the seats in the bus shelter trying to stay out of the coursing water. By the time the bus appeared and the rest of our crew made it to the pick-up, we were all thoroughly drenched, even the people who had raincoats. The drive to the Mall was also interesting--streets were flooded everywhere, many blocked off by police cars.

We arrived to the Holocaust Memorial Museum somewhat bedraggled. We met briefly with members of the research and education departments before they sent us up for a self-guided tour. I was there only once before, in 1998 when we went on a family vacation to D.C. My dad had something to do for work, so there was one day when he wasn't with us, and that was when my mom took us to the museum. I remembered the "passports" you get on your way in, and the display of shoes from the victims, but little else. Interestingly, in my memory, the shoe display was much taller (but I was somewhat shorter back then). My mom bought a book in the gift shop in 1998, All But My Life, that was a woman's memoir of her experience of the camps and the death marches. I read Primo Levi when I was a kid, too, in a yellow paperback that had belonged to my dad. I remember borrowing a book from the Windsor Library, 1500 Days in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It's amazing how those books have stayed with me (especially given my memory).

When we met for our afternoon seminar with Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, the chief curator of the POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, she told us that while little has changed at the HMM exhibition since it opened in 1994, they did change the entrance. Originally, the tour began with a "life before the war" display, but now the elevator doors open and you're met with images of the Allies discovering the camps, with a prominent quote by Eisenhower saying he needed to see it with his own eyes to be able to testify to its horrors later--as if he had a premonition of Holocaust deniers. So the change plunged you first in media res and then returned to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. The education and research members had told us plans are in the works to revise the exhibition, in part because it's so text heavy, especially on the 4th floor where you start (and the captions are nigh-impossible to read), and in part because there's a sense that there's too much focus on the Nazis and less on the history of anti-Semitism, which they worry means that kids in particular come away thinking that the Holocaust was the fault of these evil aliens, who appeared from nowhere and then were vanquished.

What struck me the most, on this visit as an adult? Images of Jews being humiliated in public in Germany, with non-Jewish girls, linked arm in arm, laughing on the sidelines like it was a carnival. I saw that in a still photo, and then in a separate video, which zoomed in on their cheerful faces briefly. They were enjoying it. In some way that disgusted me more than the SA, SS, or what have you. There was also an enormous sense of guilt and shared responsibility--or at least I felt so--and also the awful echoes of the past in the present. Things I've heard of in the past: the Evian conference in 1938, when nations met to discuss the crisis of Jewish emigration and every nation--except the Dominican Republic!--made excuses as to why they couldn't accept them. The Saint Louis, which in 1939 sailed first to Cuba, and then to Miami, with a desperate cargo of Jewish refugees, only to be turned away at each port and forced to return to Europe, where many of them later died in the camps. The debate among the Allies, in 1944, over whether to bomb Auschwitz, and effectively deciding it wasn't a worthwhile use of resources--though they bombed some minor sites just five miles away. Overall, the horrible reminder that we knew what was happening to the Jews in Europe--not the scale, perhaps (though the Allies had aerial photographs of Auschwitz, they knew it was a prison camp, they must have seen the chimneys of the crematoria working day and night), but we knew that mass murder was going on, and did nothing. And the worst thing? There was never an apology, never an acknowledgement that the Allies could have done something more, something earlier. You watch a video of Omar Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower visiting one of the camps, with the dead bodies on the ground in front of them, and another video where they forced local Germans to walk past the piles of the dead while lecturing them in German on how they let this happen--but so did we! It's terrible, too, to see this language of desperate refugees fleeing violence and being turned away at a safe port being replicated on our own borders again, and in the Mediterranean, and to think that we've learned so little about empathy.

There were other moving, awful moments, too, of course, like watching the faces of some kids who were looking at the plaster model showing the terrible machinery of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the mom hugging her kids as they looked at the replica of the barracks. The most awful videos are hidden behind concrete walls, designed to keep them from the eyes of small children. Did I watch those men being lined up and shot in mass graves when I was 11 or 12? I can't remember, though I hope not. That's another thing that continues to leave me flabbergasted, that the Nazis recorded, in video and film, so much of what they did. They took close-up photographs of men right before shooting them in the head, recorded themselves beating Lithuanian Jews to death--why? And then equally fascinating, as the war wound to a close, their panicked rush to destroy the evidence, dig up and burn the masscred bodies, burn the camp records...did they possibly think they could hide it all?

No concluding thoughts, really--I'm glad of having had the chance to go back. Everyone should have to visit that museum. Today we're going to the Smithsonian's Cultural Rescue Initiative, which trains first responders on preserving cultural heritage worldwide--hopefully less emotionally fraught than yesterday. At least the sun's out!