Museum study

Richard
Museum study
Washington, D.C., July 8, 08

When I was twelve I gave my father a small Penguin paperback called A Pictorial History of Nazi Germany as a birthday present. It was an odd gift as I look back, but the Eichmann trial was on television daily, and it was reviving my father’s memories of his time serving with American forces in the Battle of the Bulge: of finding American troops frozen to death in a clearing in the woods, the men awaiting death with their fingers still on the triggers of their rifles; of the smell of burning human flesh as he approached a concentration camp in a place where all the trees had died. He didn’t look at the photograph book much, but I did. The pictures mingled with the stories he told and became my memories, and in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I see the pictures again.

The elevator opens, and we step out in front of a large photograph showing the silhouette of an American soldier—I can tell by the outline of his rounded helmet—and in the background is a barbed wire fence and wooden huts. Are there bodies on the ground? I can’t make them out. Here the story of the Holocaust begins at its resolution, with liberation from a human-made hell.

How to experience this narrative? If you are Jewish, the suffering on display is your own suffering, if not through direct family connection then identification with Jewish history. If you are not Jewish, you can try to identify with the victims or see yourself as a liberator, which in the iconography of the museum is the American soldier. And if not a liberator, perhaps you are the son or daughter of a persecutor who may identify with the guilty. I doubt any surviving Nazis visit this place, either to relive their experiences or to grieve for them, but you never know.

Everyone is invited to identify with the victims with the offer of a card that says, “[This is] the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust.” On the outside cover is a crest showing the American eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a quiver’s worth of arrows in the other. Above the eagle’s head is a Star of David comprised of thirteen small stars. The thirteen colonies? The twelve tribes of Israel, plus the USA? Curving over the eagle is the motto: “For the dead and the living we must bear witness.” This national museum, which is also a national memorial, asks us to bear witness by a ritual enactment of the Holocaust story.

We enter a long corridor jammed with people. Documents, text panels, photographs, and film clips recording the rise of Nazi Germany from the early 1930s line both sides of the narrow passage. The glass covering the exhibits tilts out so the visitor has to stand back a little, which crowds the corridor even more. There are no colors here; all is blackness broken by the white of wall texts and the gray of photographic images.

The crowd, shuffling slowly along like a line of refugees, attempts to read every panel, something I have rarely seen in museums this dense with text, and it’s as if in their careful deliberation they’re expressing the seriousness with which they take their roles as witnesses. Mothers hush impatient children. No one pushes through the crowd. Except me. I am jittery, rebellious. I don’t want to move in an odd parallel to the people in the photographs made to wait for precious papers and dwindling rations. I don’t want to wait my turn for the next panel. It’s hard to tell if we’re being herded by the natural decorum of museum visiting or choreographed into subjugation by the museum’s intentional design.

The corridor opens onto a display of artifacts from Kristallnacht, when, on a single night in 1938, 2,000 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked. A clear Perspex case contains ruined Torah scrolls piled up as they might have been when first thrown into the streets by marauding Nazis. This part of the exhibit—marking the time when Nazi prejudice and persecution flared into open brutality—shows battered remnants: part of a shop’s stained glass, a broken ark, gates from a Jewish cemetery that no longer exists, the desecrated Torahs. We know what this devastation portends, and because these hurt and rescued objects foreshadow “the final solution” and in some sense embody and preserve it, they move me deeply. As do photographs that come next of prisoners lined up in a town square moments before they are to be shot.

I look into the eyes of one man in a photograph who stares at the camera. It is like looking into some kind of dreadful mirror. He seems to be looking back at me and asking me to put myself in his place. I see such fear. What happens to your mind? Maybe you become lost in a dream or think back to a happy time in childhood, or maybe you simply cannot comprehend that death is coming. I imagine myself frozen to the spot and frozen in time, as he is. A piece of newspaper skitters like a spider across the cobbled square in a gust of wind and comes to rest before blowing onto the boot of a soldier with a raised rifle, and this is the last image I see. The exhibit works on me despite my resistance, and it makes me understand my father’s reluctance to talk about knowledge that was so destabilizing that forever after he sought protection from risk for himself and his family—fear that dampened adventure, change, and openness to strangeness. Maybe the installation is designed to stir feelings of resistance to it at first, a sense of indignation that you have been folded into and implicated in this history—even though it is attached to me through my father and the Jewish women I have shared much of my life with. Maybe the resistance is meant gradually to melt into an understanding of the futility of resistance. And maybe these emotions are part of any mental visit to a time and place of utter helplessness.