i

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE

DEPARTMENT OF JEWISH STUDIES

THE FUTURE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN THE WAKE OF RISING ANTISEMITISM

AMANDA TAYLOR SPRING 2020

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in Accounting with honors in Jewish Studies

Reviewed and approved* by the following:

Sabine Doran Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies Thesis Supervisor and Honors Advisor

Dr. Kobi Kabalek Assistant Professor of Holocaust Studies and Visual Studies Faculty Reader

* Electronic approvals are on file. i

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an increase in antisemitism across the globe. History shows that antisemitism is nothing new but there is something different about the antisemitism seen in the world today. This new antisemitism, in part, is due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Anti-Israel sentiment has translated to animosity against Jewish people everywhere.

Another form of antisemitism is Holocaust denial. This has been on the rise as well. Although there is a history of Holocaust memory sites dating back to the years right after World War II, one form of

Holocaust memory is slowly fading away. Within the coming years, the remaining living Holocaust survivors will pass away, taking with them first-hand accounts of going through the Holocaust.

Something has to fill the gap Holocaust survivors leave behind. In this thesis, I will be analyzing

Holocaust commemoration in the form of museums and memorials in the United States, Israel, and

Europe.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 Holocaust Denial and a History of Anti-Semitism...... 5

Chapter 2 Holocaust Memory from Past to Present...... 11

Empathy Lost with the Lack of Holocaust Survivors ...... 24

Chapter 3 Analysis of Museums ...... 28

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ...... 29 Yad Vashem ...... 40 Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away...... 49

Chapter 4 Analysis of Memorials ...... 61

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe ...... 61 Pinkas Synagogue ...... 66 Stolpersteine ...... 69

Conclusion ...... 74

Appendix Photographs of Museums and Memorials ...... 76

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 85

ACADEMIC VITA ...... 92

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The exterior of the Museum on the 14 street side. USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020...... 76

Figure 2: The Hall of Witness, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020...... 77

Figure 3: The Hall of Remembrance, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020. 77

Figure 4: Detail of an interior bridge at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the names of victims etched in glass, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020. 78

Figure 5: Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020...... 78

Figure 6: Aerial View of Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020.79

Figure 7: Interior View of the Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020...... 80

Figure 8: The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020...... 80

Figure 9: Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020...... 81

Figure 10: Taylor, Amanda. “Auschwitz Exhibit Tram Car.” 2019. JPG...... 81

Figure 11: Taylor, Amanda. “Auschwitz Exhibit Red Shoe.” 2019. JPG...... 82

Figure 12: Taylor, Amanda, “Auschwitz Exhibit Model.” 2019. JPG...... 82

Figure 13: Stelae field, Stiftung Denkmal, Berlin. stiftung-denkmal.de. 28 April 2020 ...... 83

Figure 14: Ornate Vaulted Ceiling.2013. wmf.org. 28 April 2020 ...... 83

Figure 15: Pinkas Synagogue. welcometoprague.cz 28 April 2020 ...... 84

Figure 16: Katz, Jeffrey. Brass bricks known as Stolperstein, or "stumbling stones," in front of a home in Raesfeld, Germany, where five members of a single family were forcibly removed by the Nazis. Across Germany, the stones commemorate the millions of victims ...... 84

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like that my thesis advisor Sabine Doran. Her help with my entire thesis journey was invaluable and I could not have done any of this without her help. I cannot appreciate enough all of the hours she spent guiding me through this process. As a professor and advisor, she has helped shape my college experience.

I would like to thank Dr. Kobi Kabalek for stepping in at the last minute to help me make my thesis the best it could be.

I would also like to thank my Rabbi and my temple for continuously fostering my education of the Jewish religion and Jewish culture. It was through Hebrew school at my temple that I was able to learn so much about the Holocaust. I would also like to thank all of the Holocaust survivors I have had the pleasure of meeting who have had an unbelievable impact on my life.

I would like to thank my parents for their endless support in everything I do, including this thesis. The hours they spent with my editing my thesis helped it become the best it could be.

And finally, I would like to acknowledge the six million Jews that were murdered for being themselves and the millions that are still persecuted all over the world today whose lives will always be remembered.

1

Introduction

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”1. This quote is from

“Reason on Common Sense”, the first volume of the series, The Life of Reason: The Phases of

Human Progress by George Santayana. It has been quoted and paraphrased an innumerable amount of times by many around the world. People tend to use this phrase when they want to emphasize the need to remember historical events and is especially relevant when discussing the importance of the Holocaust. There is so much to be learned from studying and remembering the events of the Holocaust, from analyzing the fragility of society to the ultimate price of prejudice and racism, topics that are quite relevant in our lives today. To forget, ignore or be indifferent to remembering what happened, makes the world vulnerable to a similar tragedy happening again.

In a video from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the museum’s director

Sara Bloomfield explains, “Germany was respected around the world for its leading scientists, its physicians, its theologians. It was a very civilized, advanced country. It was a young democracy, but it was a democracy. And yet it descended not only into social collapse but world war and eventually mass murder”2. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

In the same remembrance video, Holocaust survivor Estelle Laughlin, says “Memory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand that’s where our redemption

1 SANTAYANA, GEORGE, and James Gouinlock. The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One. Edited by Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman, MIT Press, 2011. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhk7j. Accessed 5 Feb. 2020, 284 2 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Why We Remember the Holocaust.” YouTube. YouTube, uploaded by GVI, 1 Aug 2014, (01:04 - 01:36) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK9nDadFdSY&has_verified=. 22 January 2020. 2 is”3. Holocaust memory is enormously important for several reasons. One of the major reasons to remember is for those who cannot tell their stories anymore, who perished during and after the

Holocaust and whose voice was silenced. Six million Jews and millions of others were persecuted and murdered by Hitler and his Third Reich. About 37% of all Jews in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust. In Poland, the Nazis took the lives of 90% of the Jewish population.4

The lives that were lost take with them an entire culture and way of life that we can never get back and are lost forever. We also have to remember for future generations, to protect humanity from such atrocities. We can’t change the past so, for now, all we can do is study and remember who these people were, where they came from, and what happened to them.

In our country and the world right now, antisemitism is on the rise. The Anti-Defamation

League revealed that in 2017, there were 1986 anti-Semitic incidents in the United State, a 57% increase from their total in 2016.5 One of the most ubiquitous forms of antisemitism is Holocaust denial. This includes anything from denying the Holocaust completely to any attempts to lessen the severity of the events. Holocaust deniers have felt more comfortable to freely express their opinion that the Holocaust didn’t happen or wasn’t as bad as the Jewish people are making it seem.

I have personal experience with this exact example. In April of 2017, a girl I went to high school with shared a video on Facebook of a Jewish professor giving a speech on the Holocaust, her caption included remarks about how “these people can’t let go” and that the Holocaust isn’t still happening, it happened so long ago that it’s time we all just get over it. It is hard to

3 Ibid., (00:12 – 00:30) 4 Lipka, Michael. “Europe's Jewish Population.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 9 Feb. 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/. 22 January 2020. 5 “2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents.” Anti-Defamation League, www.adl.org/resources/reports/2017-audit-of- anti-semitic-incidents. 22 January 2020. 3 understand how someone could think this way and why they don’t care about the Holocaust or think it worth remembering. This was my inspiration for this thesis. To show that remembering the Holocaust is of the utmost importance and to examine the best way to present Holocaust memory. It is important for not only all of the victims that perished then, but for the people still suffering today and for the generations of people to come that can learn from Holocaust memory and Holocaust studies.

Holocaust memory has utilized the fact that Holocaust survivors go out and share their stories with people around the world. In big lecture halls or small meeting rooms, survivors tell their memories, before, during, and after the war, with the listeners in the audience, hanging on to their words and going through the emotions the survivor shares when detailing their lives being ripped away. That is something you can only get when you see a Holocaust survivor in person. A personal connection builds between the speaker and the audience and between audience members themselves that keeps the listeners engaged throughout the whole presentation. This connection is what has people discussing what they heard right after the presentation and for years after. Memories are passed on to the audience for them to pass along to others.

However, as time goes on and these survivors age, the opportunity to see them speak live diminishes every day. Soon, all we will have left is what they leave behind. As James E. Young says in his book The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory, “As the last generation of survivors begins to pass on, many seem almost desperate to leave behind a testimony, a place, or an object around which Holocaust memory might still congeal”.6 What we do with what is left behind is what will determine if Holocaust memory continues to be seen as an important part of history or

6 Young, James E. The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory. The American Jewish Committee, 1995, 2. 4 if it will fade into a small mention in world history classes. It is crucial for the future of

Holocaust memory that these stories and belongings are presented in ways that keep people’s interest and relays the importance to remember what happened in the Holocaust and who it happened to.

There are many ways to present the history of the Holocaust, along with the stories and belongings survivors leave behind. They can be found in museums, memorials, films, sculptures, books, art and so much more. Museums have been presenting all of this information in ways that will connect people to what they are looking at and encourage them to preserve Holocaust memory for future generations. Antisemitism is on the rise around the world and one way to stop its spread is to remind people what happened to the Jews and implore them to help make sure it doesn’t happen again, to Jews or anyone else.

In this thesis, I will examine how Holocaust memory has changed through time and offer alternative ways to present Holocaust Memory. I will map out Holocaust commemoration in The

United States, Israel, and Europe through the analysis of The United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum in Washington D.C.; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; and the traveling exhibit currently on display in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far

Away. I will also look at three memorials: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in

Berlin; Pinkas Synagogue in Prague; and the Stolpersteine, Stumbling Stones, throughout

Europe. For the museums and memorials, I mention in this paper, I will discuss how they are supporting the commemoration of the Holocaust and ways to improve it so that the stories of the

Holocaust are never forgotten.

5 Chapter 1

Holocaust Denial and a History of Anti-Semitism

As stated in the introduction, antisemitism is on the rise in this country and around the world. This most recent wave of antisemitism is being called “The New Antisemitism” mostly surrounding issues concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, it is not the only reason.

History shows us that when a country or government feels unstable, minorities take some of the blame by that country’s citizens, including Jews.

However, antisemitism is nothing new. It can be traced back to the early first millennium when Jews were being blamed for the crucifixion of Christ and were not looked on very favorably by the leaders of Christianity for refusing to convert.7 At this point, Jews were not referred to as Semites and the hatred towards them was more a form of anti-Judaism than antisemitism.8 For most of the early first millennium, the Catholic Church taught their followers that Jews were evil and blamed them for the crucifixion of Christ. One of the infamous myths that was spread at the time was that of the “blood libel” or the idea that Jews were using the blood of Christian children for Jewish rituals. A myth that the Nazis brought back in their propaganda against the Jewish people.9

7 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Antisemitism in History: from the Early Church to 1400.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/antisemitism -in-history-from-the-early-church-to- 1400?series=21806. 22 January 2020. 8 Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: a Concise History of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 4. 9 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Antisemitism in History: from the Early Church to 1400.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/antisemitism -in-history-from-the-early-church-to- 1400?series=21806. 22 January 2020. 6 During the Middle Ages, history records the first instances of pogroms or, “violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews” in Europe.10 The pogroms were often the result of the spread of these myths and violence ensued. Many of these non-Jewish populations blamed the Jews for the spread of the black plague, stating that it was revenge for their refusal to convert and that their way of life helped it spread.11 These are two things we see reutilized during the

Nazi reign and The Holocaust.

After the period of Enlightenment, Jews were more accepted into everyday society in many European countries, but only up to a point. They were still on the outside when it came to aspects of life, like their possibilities of attaining a good job. Someone had to be in charge of the money, but the Church looked down on that profession so the Jews had to take it. Although considered an unethical job, the Christian citizens relied on Jews to be the moneylenders, a stereotype that has lasted until today.12

Moving forward to the 1800s, things were looking better for the Jewish citizens of

Eastern Europe. The rise of nationalism forced changes in the European states and Jews were allowed into jobs that they couldn’t have been before and took advantage of this new freedom.13

This, of course, angered some of the Christian citizens as they feared the Jews taking away all their jobs and stealing their money.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Antisemitism in History: The Early Modern Era, 1300–1800.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/antisemitism -in-history-the-early-modern-era-1300- 1800?series=21806. 22 January 2020. 13 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Antisemitism in History: The Era of Nationalism, 1800–1918.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/antisemitism -in-history-the-era-of-nationalism-1800- 1918?series=21806. 22 January 2020. 7 However, it was in the late 19th century that the hatred of Jews moved in a different direction. For most of history to this point, the disdain for Jews was based on the fact that they practiced a different religion, but also cultural differences and economic competition. It went from being against the Jewish religion to being against a racial construct of Jews as Semites.14 A group of people that is tied together by some sort of racial characteristics, not just or necessarily the religion they practice, a racially-defined hatred of Jews that began before Hitler’s time that he exploited during his reign. This was, in my opinion, one of the most detrimental changes in the persecution against Jews. It was no longer about an optional choice on what religion to practice and what god to follow. Now, there was something inherently different and inherently bad about

Jewish people that they cannot just convert away. They were no longer considered part of the white races; they were less than.

As told by the USHMM, “These new "anti-Semites," as they called themselves, drew upon older stereotypes to maintain that the Jews behaved the way they did—and would not change—because of innate racial qualities inherited from the dawn of time.”15 Once this distinction was made that they were the inferior race, Jews were considered to be a serious threat to the European way of life. They now possessed these innate qualities that would not go away and would bring down the rest of European society. During and after World War I arose new antisemitic tropes in Germany and Austria, most notably one believing all Jews were communists and guilty of betraying their country and leading to defeat. People also used old

14 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “Antisemitism in History: Racial Antisemitism, 1875–1945.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/antisemitism -in-history-racial-antisemitism - 18751945?series=21806 22 January 2020. 15 Ibid. 8 Jewish stereotypes, such as money-hungry, conniving, and distrustful to make Jews the scapegoat for the war and the economic downturn that followed.16

Then we come to the Nazi regime and World War II. Hitler played on the antisemitic feelings and stereotypes that came before him, although the Nazis often downplayed antisemitism in their electoral campaigns and hatred of Jews was not a major reason for their many votes. The classification of Jews that the Nazi regime laid out was based on the idea that

Jews were not people that practiced a religion, but a wholly separate race with defining inherited characteristics that they innately possessed. According to him, a person was Jewish if a blood relative was Jewish. It didn’t matter if they practiced the religion or not.17 The anti-Jewish feelings of the Middle Ages show up again during the Holocaust as many European non-Jews turned on their Jewish neighbors and attacked them, their homes, and their places of business, the most famous of which is Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938, was a nationwide pogrom against Jews that was the culmination of months of smaller attacks upon Jewish people in Germany and Nazi-controlled territories. As the first openly and nationwide violence against Jews in Nazi Germany, this was a major turning point against the Jews in the Holocaust, leading to the Final Solution.18

Another parallel to the middle ages is the fact that Hitler used the Jews as the scapegoat for all of Germany’s societal and economic issues after World War I, just as the people in the

14th century blamed the Jews for the black plague. Hitler exploited and intensified scapegoat

16 Ibid. 17 "Translation: Nuremberg Race Laws". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 6 Jan 2020. https://encyclopedia.USHMM.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws 1 February 2020. 18 “Kristallnacht: Background & Overview.” Background & Overview of Kristallnacht, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-kristallnacht. 1 February 2020. 9 mechanisms into widespread hate and prejudice against the Jewish people, which then cleared the path for the events of The Holocaust to occur.

After a period of latent antisemitism, today we see that antisemitism is on the rise once again. It shows in obvious ways like the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the Nazi salutes at the protest in Charlottesville, and the Hanukkah stabbing on December 28, 2019, of a Rabbi in his home in my hometown. But there are also the ways you don’t see on the news, like the temple of a friend of mine getting defaced with swastikas and Hitler’s name, along with all of the racist rants people endure every day for just being Jewish. People saying things, like head to the gas chamber or Holocaust deniers that say there never was a Holocaust of the Jewish people, but there should be.

Most of this animosity towards Jews had already existed, but it is rapidly increasing every day, as can be seen, by the statistics from the Anti-Defamation League discussed earlier.

This new wave of antisemitism has very close ties to anti-Israel sentiment. Yaroslav Trofimov wrote in a Wall Street Journal article “Jews in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere are regularly blamed for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—a minority within one country being held accountable for the policy decisions of the government of another.”19 In “Overview of a Crisis”

Shalom Freedman reviews Kenneth Sterns’ book Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How

It Is Different and How to Fight It, and discusses that Stern “notes that the collapse of the Israeli-

Palestinian peace process in September 2000 "gave new license to express vitriol against the sole

Jewish state on the planet,’”20 Freedman goes on to talk about the rise is in antisemitism on

19 Trofimov, Yaroslav. “The New Anti-Semitism.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 12 July 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-anti-semitism-11562944476. 1 February 2020. 20 Freedman, Shalom. “Overview of a Crisis.” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 19, no. 3/4, 2007, pp. 204. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25834768. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020. 10 college campuses and that Stern quotes Martin Kramer’s work by saying it, “shows that many

Middle Eastern Studies departments have become "virtual propaganda machines that ignore the human rights abuses in every Arab country, but rail against Israel, and assert that its mere existence is an example of racism.’”21 This rise in anti-Israeli sentiment related is worrisome as the State of Israel was created in part as a response to the decimation of Jews in the Holocaust. In his article “’ But I still don’t get why the Jews’: using cause and change to answer pupils’ demand for an overview of antisemitism,” Darius Jackson teaches that “to understand antisemitism it is important to examine the context in which it appeared.”22

With this growing hatred of Israel, it is important to realize is that global antisemitism is on the rise, and so is antisemitism right here in America. Freedman notes that Stern concludes that an understanding that there are different kinds of antisemitism and each must be fought differently.23 One kind of antisemitism is Holocaust denial and can be combatted by the continuing presentation of Holocaust memory around the world.

21 Ibid. 22 Jackson, Darius. “'But I Still Don't Get Why the Jews': Using Cause and Change to Answer Pupils' Demand for an Overview of Antisemitism.” Teaching History, no. 153, 2013, pp. 16. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43260623. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020. 23 Freedman, Shalom. “Overview of a Crisis.” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 19, no. 3/4, 2007, pp. 205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25834768. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020. 11

Chapter 2

Holocaust Memory from Past to Present

Over the past 75 years, the memorialization of the Holocaust in Europe and North

America has seen many changes. As time has passed, there has been a global push for the preservation of Holocaust memory. Young said, “indeed, the further the Holocaust recedes into time, the more prominent its memorials and museums become.”24 After the Holocaust ended, it took time for people all over the world to come to terms with what happened, accept their own involvement, and to then begin to preserve Holocaust history in their region. Poland, for example, instituted, in 2018, a law making it a criminal act to discuss Poland’s involvement in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust.25 Limiting speech this way allows for Holocaust deniers to spread their claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen, as people will have a hard time disproving them without mentioning the events that took place in Poland. To ensure this type of antisemitism doesn’t spread any further, Holocaust memory must be presented effectively. First, we will introduce the history of Holocaust memorials.

Young explains “the very first Holocaust memorials anywhere were the places of destruction themselves.”26 Young goes on to say that the first Holocaust memorial museum of its kind, was at the remains of the concentration camp Majdanek, in Poland. According to its website, the State Museum at Majdanek began as a memorial museum in 1944, the same year it

24 Young, James E. The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory. The American Jewish Committee, 1995, 1. 25 Donadio, Rachel. “The Dark Consequences of Poland's New Holocaust Law.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 9 Feb. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/poland-holocaust-law/552842/. 28 April 2020. 26 Young, James Edward. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Yale Univ. Press, 2000, 120 12 was liberated.27 A similar memorial museum was set up at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau in

1946, with official Polish state museum status in 1947, on the seventh anniversary of the first deportation to the camp, as stated on its website.28 These two camps have a uniqueness to them: as the Germans were scrambling to leave to escape before the Allied armies converged on the camps, they did not have time to destroy all of the evidence of these camps. So, much of

Majdanek and Auschwitz were left intact, including barracks, gas chambers, crematoria, and the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei”, “work will set you free,” sign at the entrance to Auschwitz. The importance of these two memorial museums is that “they compel the visitor to accept the horrible fact that what they show is real.”29 These concentration camp memorials lend truth and evidence to the events of the Holocaust.

Around the same time, the world’s first Holocaust museum was being built in Israel. In

1949, a group of Holocaust survivors founded the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish

Resistance Heritage Museum, Documentation and Study Center, more commonly known as The

Ghetto Fighters’ House. According to its website, the museum “tells the story of the Holocaust during World War II, emphasizing the bravery, spiritual triumph and the incredible ability of

Holocaust survivors and the fighters of the revolt to rebuild their lives in a new country about which they had dreamed – the State of Israel.”30 Shortly after, in 1953, Israel built another

Holocaust museum, one they are known for, Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem was the first major

27 “About the Museum.” Majdanek, Państwowe Muzeum Na Majdanku, www.majdanek.eu/en/mission. 1 February 2020. 28 “History of the Museum.” Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, auschwitz.org/en/museum/history-of-the-memorial/. 1 February 2020. 29 Young, James E. The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory. The American Jewish Committee, 1995, 33. 30“About the Ghetto Fighters' House.” Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, www.gfh.org.il/eng/About_the_Museum. 1 February 2020. 13 museum to focus on all aspects of Holocaust memory including Holocaust history, Holocaust research, and honoring the victims that died and the people that tried to save them.

At the same time, while Israel was building Yad Vashem, France was also at the forefront of Holocaust commemoration. In 1953, Isaac Schneersohn, a French Rabbi originally from

Ukraine, created The Memorial for the Unknown Jewish Martyr, Le Mémorial du Martyr Juif

Inconnu, a memorial tomb for the Jews that were murdered. As the website tells, in 1956 the building for the memorial crypt was officially inaugurated and in 2005 the memorial was expanded into a museum claiming “the Shoah Memorial is both a museum offering a permanent exhibition, two temporary exhibitions each year and numerous cultural events (meetings, projections, testimonies), an archive center open to research and a place of memory and transmission.”31

However, Isaac Schneersohn contributed much more than just this memorial. The memorial’s website describes how in 1943, Schneersohn, with the help of 40 others in the French

Jewish community, started what is now called the Center of Contemporary Jewish

Documentation, the first archive of Holocaust-related material. The foundation’s purpose was to gather evidence of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people, so further generations would know what happened. Much of what the foundation gathered was used in the Nuremberg trials as evidence of Nazi war crimes against Jews.32

31 “History of the Shoah Memorial.” Mémorial De La Shoah, Mémorial De La Shoah, www.memorialdelashoah.org/le-memorial/qui-sommes-nous/histoire-du-memorial-de-la-shoah.html. 1 February 2020. 32 “The History of the CDJC.” Mémorial De La Shoah, Mémorial De La Shoah, www.memorialdelashoah.org/en/archives-and-documentation/the-documentation-center/the-history-of-the- cdjc.html. 1 February 2020. 14 Another French contribution to Holocaust memory is the documentary Night and Fog, directed by Alain Resnais. The movie premiered in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, and 11 years after the liberation of France from Nazi rule. In an article for

The Criterion Collection, film critic Phillip Lopate called it “the most aesthetically sophisticated and ethically irreproachable” when comparing it to other films that focus on the Holocaust.33 The

British Film Institute has listed it as the fourth-best documentary of all time in their magazine,

Sight, and Sound.34

The film shows the ruins of Auschwitz and Majdanek while discussing several main topics of the Holocaust including the rise of Nazism, the events that took place at the camps and the aftermath, and asking a question that even Holocaust scholars have yet to answer, who is responsible? One of the most important aspects of this film is its acceptance of limit to what we as viewers can comprehend when relaying the realities of living in one of the concentration camps.35 With the lines “it is useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and “no description, no picture can reveal their true dimension from the documentary,” Lopate points out

“the dialectic is set up between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so.”36 However, as Joseph Hirsch puts it in his book Afterimage, “it contributed to a new discourse of historical trauma through the content of its form,” something he calls “posttraumatic cinema.”37 Some of the images show in the documentary are disturbing and traumatic and could turn people off from the film but the narration introduced in Night and Fog is meant to, “have

33 Lopate, Phillip. “Night and Fog.” The Criterion Collection, The Criterion Collection, 23 June 2003, www.criterion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog. 1 February 2020. 34 “Filmmakers' Greatest Documentaries of All Time: Sight & Sound.” British Film Institute, British Film Institute, 25 Apr. 2019, www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/filmmakers-greatest-docs. 1 February 2020. 35 Lopate, Phillip. “Night and Fog.” The Criterion Collection, The Criterion Collection, 23 June 2003, www.criterion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog. 1 February 2020. 36 Ibid. 37 Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage. Temple University Press, 2004. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/9653, 31 15 spectators open themselves up to the traumatizing potential of the images without having to resort to the defenses of numbing, denial, or premature mastery.”38 This new idea meant that the truth of what happened could be shown without losing the viewer with its traumatic implications.

The 1950s also saw the publication of perhaps one of the most influential pieces of

Holocaust memory. In 1952, The Diary of Young Girl by Anne Frank, was translated to English, with American and UK publications. Unable to comprehend the entirety of the Holocaust and the number of people that lost their lives, this diary put a face to an unthinkable act of hate. It was a young girl that many people could relate to, as she shared her feelings about not just experience in hiding, but her experiences growing up, ones that every young girl has. This diary brought humanity back to Holocaust victims that were known as one of the six million. As the Anne

Frank House website points out, it was a book that could be read by people of any age anywhere in the world, as it has been published in over 70 languages.39

It was a turning point in Holocaust memory. In his article for The Pittsburgh Jewish

Chronicle, Toby Tabachnick explains the diary had a hard time getting published in America, as publishing houses thought that people did not want to face what had happened and would not want to read a book of this nature, until to Judith Jones read it and became the first to publish the diary on America.40 This was the case for many Holocaust memoirs and movies, including the aforementioned Night and Fog. When Anne Frank’s diary was published, and in 1955 turned into a successful theater play, many readers and viewers found a personal connection to the

38 Ibid., 61 39 “The Publication of the Diary.” Anne Frank Website, Anne Frank House, 25 June 2019, www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/publication-diary/. 1 February 2020. 40 Tabachnick, Toby. “The Editor Who Didn’t Pass on Anne Frank; Jones Recalls Famous Diary.” The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, Times of Israel, 1 Apr. 2009, jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/the-editor-who-didnt-pass-on- anne-frank-jones-recalls-famous-diary/. 1 February 2020. 16 Holocaust, which in turn could lead people to inquire more about the events of the Holocaust and the fate of the Jewish people.

In an episode of the second season of the FX show American Horror Story, a patient at a mental institution in 1964 claims to be Anne Frank and that she survived the war and moved to

America. While this scenario is impossible, as Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belson, her answer to the question posed by the woman in charge rings true, exposing how audiences perceive of Anne

Frank’s story and figure. She was asked why she has never come forward with her identity and responds, “It was the diary. People finally started to pay attention to what they’d done to us. All because of a martyred 15-year old girl. She had to stay 15. And a martyr.”41 Part of the importance of the Anne Frank diary lies in the fact she was captured and killed at just 15. The death of an innocent young girl has a greater effect on people than that of an adult. Today, there have been many movies, plays, and books written about Anne Frank. Almost every Holocaust museum mentions her at some point. Many schools include her diary as part of the required reading for the year, accomplishing one of the most important goals of Holocaust memory: inspiring the next generation to learn about the Holocaust and understand its importance in history.

Anne Frank’s place in Holocaust memory reaches even further with the opening of the annex, in which the Frank family and four others went into hiding, as a museum in Amsterdam.

The Anne Frank House opened as a museum in 1960, fifteen years after Otto Frank, her father, returned after the Holocaust. In this museum, the visitor goes behind the bookcase that was hiding the annex, walks up the steep staircase into the attic that has been made to look as it did

41 "I am Anne Frank - Part 1." American Horror Story: Asylum, written by Jessica Sharzer, directed by Michael Uppendahl, FX, 2012, 00:11:41 – 00:11:52) 17 when it was occupied by the people in hiding. There are pictures on the walls, the lines of where

Anne’s parents were keeping track of Anne’s and her older sister Margot’s heights, and many other pieces of their family history. After the visitor go back down from the annex, you enter a room with her original diary and some original pages on display bringing you closer to her as a young writer than just reading a published version. The visitor gets to connect to Anne Frank the person as she wrote and rewrote pages of her diary that she thought might one day be published.

According to her article on the History Channel website, over 30 million copies of the diary have been sold, the most of any other Holocaust memoir.42

While Anne Frank’s diary might be the most-read piece of Holocaust literature, it is far from the only biography of that time. Italian-born author Primo Levi was an Auschwitz survivor and wrote a memoir If This Was a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz in America, of his experiences in the concentration camps. He would write down his memories as they came to him and finished his memoir in 1946. Although edited and sent to a publishing house in 1947, the memoir was denied publication as it encountered a similar kind of issue Anne Frank’s diary did according to the biography Primo Levi: A Life by Ian Thomson.43 Some of the writers at the publishing house didn’t want to publish a first-hand account of what happened in the camps, as it was too soon after the war, and readers did not yet want to confront the truths. Primo found a small publisher to publish some copies to an underwhelming release.44 In the years to come, he found other publishers to publish the book with more copies in other languages. Although not the household name Anne Frank is, Primo Levi and his writing are crucial to most Holocaust scholars and

42 Blakemore, Erin. “How Anne Frank's Private Diary Became an International Sensation.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 31 July 2019, www.history.com/news/anne-frank-diary-symbol-holocaust. 1 February 2020. 43 Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: A Life. Saint Martins Press, 2004, 229-33. 44 Ibid., 246 18 Holocaust memory in general. Every first-hand account is important, every story, every character helps to build the foundation of Holocaust memory. No one survivor had the same Holocaust experience and so gathering as many first-hand accounts as possible helps to preserve every aspect of the Holocaust.

Another biography that has captivated people around the world is Night by Elie Wiesel.

In May 1944, Wiesel and his family were deported to Auschwitz, and Wiesel would eventually be transferred to Buchenwald before he was liberated by the United States Army.45 Wiesel, in his autobiography All Rivers Run to the Sea says he originally wrote his story down in Yiddish and it was featured in a Polish memoir series about the war.46 Wiesel, like many others, had a hard time getting his book published, this time publishers calling his book too morbid. He eventually found a French publisher in 1958, who cut the book’s length and changed the title to, La Nuit, or Night in English.47 In 1960, Wiesel found a publisher who would publish it in America selling a few thousand copies.48 However, by 2011, it had sold six million copies in America and was translated into 30 languages, literary critic Ruth Franklin tells in her book A Thousand

Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.49 It too has been included on school required reading lists and as Franklin explains, its impact stems from its minimalist construction.50 Its readability, in terms of length and writing style, reaches everyone young and old, inspiring more and more people to become involved in learning about the Holocaust.

45 Wiesel, Elie. Night. Bantam Books, 1982. 46 Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995, 319. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 325 49 Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2013, 69. 50 Ibid., 70 19 Not all Holocaust autobiographies focus solely on the events of the camps. Before even finding a publisher for a book, Art Spiegelman published his story, chapter by chapter, in the annual edition of Raw, a graphic magazine that Spiegelman helped run from 1980-1999, according to Arie Kaplan in his book From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books.51 After finally finding an editor in 1986, the first six chapters of the comic strip were published in book form titled Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The comic is all about him and the story of his father, a

Holocaust survivor. It was an early publication on the topic of transferred guilt and inherited trauma of the children of Holocaust survivors. Maus is telling two stories at once, the story of

Spiegelman’s father telling him his story and the memories his father is telling him. Spiegelman introduced a new medium to present the events of the Holocaust, as well as facing realities of the post-liberation lives of his survivor parents and him.52 Eventually, all we are going to have is the retelling of stories by descendants of survivors. Maus is one example of the changing face of

Holocaust memory and a new way to keep the memory alive.

These books are far from the only books about the Holocaust people read, but they are books that inspired my analysis of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. There are many other fiction and nonfiction Holocaust books written by authors of different backgrounds and relations to the Holocaust. Some are bestsellers, like The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, a book about a non-Jewish girl and her war experiences, including hiding a Jewish man in the basement.53 Some books are only known to a select few, like Clara’s Story about a young woman’s experience being a hidden child.54 As Elie Wiesel said of Clara’s book, “it is an important document –

51 Kaplan, Arie. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Jewish Publication Society, 2008, 171. 52Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a Survivors Tale. Pantheon, 1986. 53 Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Aflred A. Knopf, 2005. 54 Isaacman, Clara, and Joan Adess. Grossman. Clara’s Story. Jewish Publication Society, 1993. 20 especially for children… yours is a testimony that deserved to be heard – as are the testimonies of all survivors.”55

As there are many books about the Holocaust, there are also many movies. It is thought the first feature film to include elements of the Holocaust is a movie called The Unvanquished, which premiered in 1945, a film that is now really only seen at Jewish film festivals. It is from the former Soviet Union and contains scenes portraying the mass executions of millions of

Soviet Jews. It includes several motifs that are present in many later Holocaust films including, according to the Jewish Film Festivals website, “a hidden Jewish child, a character of a righteous gentile, and a tragic procession of Jews being marched towards their death.”56

While there are a great number of Holocaust movies that have been made since the end of

World War II, few have had the lasting impact that Schindler’s List has since its premiere in

1993. The movie focuses on Oskar Schindler, a businessman who saved over a thousand Polish

Jews from being deported to concentration camps by claiming they were crucial workers for his factory.57 While there were many Holocaust films already made, Schindler’s List opened the door for more blockbuster movies about the Holocaust to be made and viewed by mainstream culture, an audience that not all films can reach. Although not all attempts at major studio movies about the Holocaust received positive reviews from Holocaust scholars, the fact that they exist is a step forward in the preservation of Holocaust memory.

Schindler’s List was directed by Steven Spielberg but he was very hesitant to take the job at first. In an interview with the Social Education academic journal, he revealed that he, like

55 Ibid. 56 Donskoy, Mark. “The Unvanquished, Documentary from the USSR.” Jewish Film Festivals, Jewish Film Festivals, 7 Apr. 2016, jewishfilmfestivals.org/films/1945/the-unvanquished/. 1 February 2020. 57 Spielberg, Steven, director. Schindler's List. Universal Pictures, 1993. 21 many others then and now, was at odds with his Jewish identity and he wasn’t sure he could make this film.58 However, Spielberg noticed something happening then that is still happening today, a rise in Holocaust denial and general anti-Semitic feeling. He ended up directing the movie and winning several Academy Awards for it. Spielberg said he made the movie for the same reasons I believe are most important when it comes to Holocaust memory: educating the youth. In an interview where he was asked about his continuing work with Holocaust memory, he said, “My primary purpose in making Schindler's List was for education. The Holocaust had been treated as just a footnote in so many textbooks or not mentioned at all. Millions knew little if anything about it. Others tried to deny it happened at all. The first steps were to make the film available to as many high school students as possible.”59

The success of the film has led to more than just a few Academy Awards. With the proceeds from Schindler’s List, Spielberg set up the Shoah Foundation, which now permanently resides at the University of Southern California. Spielberg created this foundation in 1994 to

“videotape and preserve interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust” continuing his work to educate the world of the horrors of not only the Holocaust but other genocides around the world as well.60 The foundation has collected over 115,000 hours of video testimonies of survivors from 65 countries in 43 languages made available to Holocaust scholars and students for generations to come, according to the foundation website. As presented in the book Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, “the Visual History Archive sits squarely at the symbolic center of a remediation process that over the past two decades has intertwined

58 Spielberg, Steven. Interview. by Stephen Feinberg and Samuel Totten. October 2005 http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/5906/590613.html 1 February 2020. 59 Ibid. 60 “About Us.” USC Shoah Foundation, USC Shoah Foundation, 20 Apr. 2020, sfi.usc.edu/about. 1 February 2020. 22 technologies of representation and memory keeping in ways that have challenged traditional conceptions of historical representation.”61

In the same year Schindler’s List premiered, the Unites States took a huge step toward the preservation of Holocaust memory with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum (USHMM) in 1993. It continues to be at the forefront of Holocaust research, with an extensive research library and research librarians that can help with almost any request for

Holocaust information. While a museum first, the USHMM places a lot of emphasis on education. This will be discussed later in this paper.

In 2001, Berlin officially opened the Jewish Museum Berlin, which dedicates several exhibits to the Holocaust. An article in the Smithsonian Magazine by Tom Mueller details how the museum was first built in 1933, right before the Nazis came to power and was subsequently shut down during Kristallnacht. However, in 1989, after much debate over how to reopen the museum, the design by Daniel Libeskind was chosen for the new building nicknamed “the Blitz” because of it its zig-zagged pattern.62 The new building opened in 2001. This was a big step forward for Germany acknowledging the actions of their Nazi regime.

A year before the museum officially opened, another Eastern European city made steps to memorialize the Holocaust. In 2000, Vienna unveiled the memorial Judenplatz Holocaust

Memorial, also called The Nameless Library. Designed by Rachel Whiteread, it features a building resembling a bunker with doors that cannot be opened and sides that are lined with rows and rows of books. The book’s spines face inwards making them impossible to identify, as

61 Fogu, Claudio, Kansteiner, Wulf, Presner, Tom. Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture. Harvard University Press, 2016, 169. 62 Mueller, Tom. “Jewish Museum Berlin.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 31 May 2006, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/jewish-museum-berlin-119980984/. 1 February 2020. 23 described in Adrian Searle’s article in the Guardian, “Austere, silent and nameless - Whiteread's concrete tribute to victims of Nazism.”63 It speaks to the Jewish people and the lost information of Jewish lives and cultures that would’ve filled those books. On a square platform around the memorial are the names of the concentration camps where Austrian Jews were killed. Although striking, it does its job at invoking an uncomfortable feeling over what happened and hopefully turns more people towards understanding the importance of the Holocaust.

Berlin has its own Holocaust memorial that has been met with a lot of controversies. The

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was opened in 2005, as part of the 60th anniversary for the end of the war.64 It consists of 2,711 stelae rectangles of different heights and lengths to represent the variety of Jewish lives taken during the Holocaust, as described on their website.

Before and since its opening, the memorial has been met with a myriad of criticism from

Holocaust scholars and visitors alike. This will be discussed in more detail later in this paper.

A more recent form of Holocaust memory comes from the exhibit Auschwitz. Not Long

Ago. Not Far Away. currently on display in New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.

According to an article by Ralph Blumenthal and Joseph Berger in the New York Times, the exhibit, originally on display in Madrid, consists of over 700 artifacts from Jewish victims of

Auschwitz being seen in America for the first time.65 The exhibit opened in New York on May 8,

2019, 74 years after the Nazi surrender. In addition to the exhibit, the museum has set up several

63 Searle, Adrian. “Review: Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 25 Oct. 2000, www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/oct/26/artsfeatures6. 1 February 2020. 64 “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, www.stiftung-denkmal.de/denkmaeler/denkmal-fuer-die- ermordeten-juden-europas-mit-ausstellung-im-ort-der-information/. 65 Blumenthal, Ralph, and Joseph Berger. “The Horrors of Auschwitz at a Museum in New York.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Jan. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/design/auschwitz-museum-of- jewish-heritage.html. 1 February 2020. 24 other programs to educate the students of New York City and share survivor stories to anyone who wants to go listen. These will be discussed later in this paper.

This is how far Holocaust memory has come since the end of the war in 1945. As the antisemitic feeling and acts of violence against Jewish people increase every day, it is important now more than ever to preserve all of these pieces of Holocaust history by bringing them to life and making them more accessible to the general public. While antisemitism is not just Holocaust denial, preserving Holocaust memory can help curb antisemitism in some instances. It is crucial to ensure the continuing education of Holocaust history to inspire people of the world to remember the Holocaust and prevent anything like it to happen in the future.

Empathy Lost with the Lack of Holocaust Survivors

Anyone who has seen a Holocaust survivor speak will know there is something intangible that happens in the room. A feeling you only get seeing a survivor speak in person. The stories survivors have to share with the rest of the world are extremely important. It is evidence of what the perpetrators did to the victims, as well as evidence of how easily people can turn on their neighbors and friends given the right circumstances and environment. Thomas Trezise, in his book Witnessing Witnessing, discusses the loss of this essential part of Holocaust memory. This loss is weighing on historians and people alike. Trezise says “as the last Holocaust survivors age and passes away, the awareness that all living memory of the events themselves will soon be extinguished has fostered regarding survivor testimony what one could call anxiety of historical transmission.”66 He goes on to say that people are afraid of an unknown future where “the fate of

66 Trezise, Thomas. Witnessing Witnessing: on the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. Fordham University Press, 2014, 1. 25 Holocaust survivor testimony will depend entirely on its reception by those who ‘were not there.’”67 We will be losing something with the death of Holocaust survivors, creating a hole that has to be filled by the effective presentation of Holocaust memory.

Even though we will have survivor testimonies in books, movies, and video interviews, we still lose something when we aren’t hearing these stories face to face. Some empathy is lost when we don’t get to see the survivor in person and, if the testimonies need to inspire people to preserver Holocaust memory, then empathy is important. In an article in the

CyberPyschology and Behavior Journal, Dr. John Suler, Ph.D. talks about the disinhibition effect of online communication. The disinhibition effect, in short, is when a user acts and responds differently online than in person, due to many factors including not having to look people in the eye or wait for their responses.68 An article published in the American Journal for

Pharmaceutical Education, titled “The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy”, used this disinhibition effect to analyze the loss of empathy in health services and medical patients. The researches had three observations on reasons the disinhibition effect worsens patient care in online appointments. Christopher Terry, PharmD, and Jeff Cain, EdD, MS say

the nature of online communications is such that individuals are physically invisible to

others, permitting them to disregard any type of eye contact or physical reaction of the

other person(s). A significant portion of traditional face-to-face communications tends to

67 Ibid., 2 68 Suler, John "The Online Disinhibition Effect." CyberPsychology and Behavior, vol. 7, no. 3, 28 July 2004, 321-22. https://www-liebertpub-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/doi/pdf/10.1089/1094931041291295 7 February 2020. 26 be nonverbal (eg, body language, tone of voice), and without these cues, online

conversations lack an essential element of understanding.69

This applies to the transmission to Holocaust memory as well. The level of empathy inspired by an in-person survivor cannot be replaced by just online interviews or autobiographies. People, in general, are unattached when they aren’t interacting with a real live person. Without the survivor there, it is important to create the same level of empathy in other ways for our current society.

For example, the Instagram account Eva’s Stories follows a young girl as the Nazi regime takes power and life for Jewish people heads in a negative direction.70 The use of social media to encourage the continuing preservation of Holocaust memory will reach the people that don’t find themselves going to museums but do find themselves scrolling on their phones. Jeffrey Shandler, in his book Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, studies the use of media focusing on the USC

Shoah Foundation and analyzes the positive and negative effects of digital presentation on

Holocaust memory. This investigation into the future of Holocaust memory is important to be able to plan for the future and inspire the level of empathy in what we do have left, including museums, memorials, and films.

However, museums and memorials can also become the very site, where a lack of empathy is exposed. Shahak Shapira, a German descendent of a Holocaust survivor put together a website of 12 “selfies” taken at the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the BBC

69 Terry, C., PharmD., & Cain, Jeff, EdD., M.S. (2016). The emerging issue of digital empathy. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 80(4), 2. Retrieved from http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://search- proquest-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/docview/1809033072?accountid=13158 7 February 2020. 70 Holmes, Oliver. “Instagram Holocaust Diary Eva. Stories Sparks Debate in Israel.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 May 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/08/instagram-holocaust-diary-evastories-sparks- debate-in-israel. 7 February 2020. 27 describes in the article “'Yolocaust': How should you behave at a Holocaust memorial?” by Joel

Gunter. It seemed people were smiling or sunbathing on stones that are supposed to represent victims of mass murder. He took these selfies and photoshopped images from concentration camps over where the stones were. Of his project and his “concern over a trend in European and

US politics which he saw as a threat to the lessons of the Holocaust,” Shapira said the BBC article, "I am worried that younger people fail to understand the importance of these memorials.

They're not there for me - for Jews - or the victims, they are there for the people of today, for their moral compass. So they know not to elect the guys with the Hitler haircuts because we could end up right where we were 80 years ago.”71 To ensure this disconnect doesn’t get worse when Holocaust survivors aren’t telling their stories in person anymore, there must be a way to keep their memory alive in the Holocaust museums and memorials to make sure nothing like it happens again.

71 Gunter, Joel. “'Yolocaust': How Should You Behave at a Holocaust Memorial?” BBC News, BBC, 20 Jan. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835. 7 February 2020.

28 Chapter 3

Analysis of Museums

There are many aspects of a museum that can have a powerful effect on its visitors.

Exhibits, special events, architecture, and more can be used to craft an immersive experience.

One of the jobs of museums is to present the facts and educate visitors in a way that is both accurate and engaging. Too many words can lose viewers' interest, but too few words can lose important information, wasting the opportunity for education. Often schools take trips to museums, so it's important to appeal to the younger generations as well with special programming in addition to the museum exhibits.

However, something isn’t working. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against

Germany commissioned a study on Holocaust awareness and found some staggering results.

11% of adults and 22% of millennials “haven’t heard or are not sure if they have heard of the

Holocaust.”72 If a decent percentage of young people know little to nothing about the Holocaust, the future of Holocaust memory is in jeopardy. These results also shocked Executive Vice

President of the Claims Conference Greg Schneider as he said, “There remain troubling gaps in

Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories. We must be committed to ensuring the horrors of the

Holocaust and the memory of those who suffered so greatly are remembered, told, and taught by future generations.”73 In this section, I will be analyzing Holocaust education in the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Auschwitz

72 “New Survey by Claims Conference Finds Significant Lack of Holocaust Knowledge in the United States.” Claims Conference, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 10 Apr. 2018, www.claimscon.org/study/. 7 February 2020. 73 Ibid. 29 exhibit Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away currently on display in New York City’s

Museum of Jewish Heritage.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is located on 100 Raoul

Wallenberg Place SW, a nod to the man who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from

Nazi persecution. The architecture on the outside at first blends with the rest of the buildings in

D.C., but there is more than meets the eye. As the museum says on their website “The curved portico of the 14th Street entrance … is a mere facade, a fake screen that opens to the sky, deliberately hiding the disturbing architecture of skewed lines and hard surfaces of the real entrance that lies behind it” and “along the north brick walls, a different perspective reveals a roofline profile of camp guard towers, a procession of sentry boxes”74 (Figure 1). Right away the museum is laying the groundwork for an immersive museum experience, which begins by presenting the perspective of the American liberators of camps inside Germany – addressing the local public.

Visitors begin in the Hall of Witness. The ceiling is made of several panes of glass skewed in a way to make the visitor feel uneasy, as if something uncomfortable is about to happen, which it probably will as they go through the permanent exhibition (Figure 2). As the architect, James Ingo Freed says, the staggered daylight effect is to “tell the visitor something is

74 “Architecture and Art: Museum Exterior.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/about-the-museum/architecture-and-art/exterior. 7 February 2020. 30 amiss here.”75 The flooring has a similar pattern that, as the museum explains, “underscores a sense of imbalance, distortion, and rupture—characteristics of the society in which the Holocaust took place.”76 All of this combines to set the scene for the presentation of Holocaust history.

The architecture of the USHMM plays an important role in this museum’s presentation of

Holocaust memory. Its significance lies in its subtlety. While it could be easy to miss some aspects of the outside architecture, like the pillars resembling the guard towers or not notice the light in the Hall of Witnesses is distorted, it is subconsciously prepping the visitor for the history they are about to delve into. Just as some visitors ignored or didn’t notice the warning signs about the museum’s contents, citizens of the world didn’t notice the warning signs of what was about to happen to the Jews and the other groups that were labeled as undesirables. These details show the visitor that is the smaller things along the way that build-up to the bigger things in the end. While small acts of hate may seem like a normal part of life in today’s society, they are all warning signs of what could come. Actions like these build followings and over time turn into movements like The National Socialist German Workers' Party.

The permanent exhibition of the museums is separated into three floors for three different periods: the rise of the Nazi regime; life in the ghettos and concentration camps, and the “final solution;” and the aftermath of liberation and getting back to normal life. A major feature of the permanent exhibition is the card you get as you enter with the name and story of a European Jew that you follow along throughout the exhibit. In the end, you find out what happened to your person creating a connection between the visitor and each part of the museum.

75 “Architecture and Art: Hall of Witnesses.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/about-the-museum/architecture-and-art/hall-of-witness. 7 February 2020. 76 Ibid. 31 The first floor called “The Nazi Assault – 1933 to 1939” details the circumstances that allowed the Nazis to rise to power and push along their ideology for citizens to turn on their

Jewish neighbors and blame them for all the problems in Germany.77 This floor is especially important so that visitors can understand the warning signs and stop them from growing in their own communities. One part of this floor is the bridge that you cross to continue with the exhibit, covered with the names of cities and towns that would suffer irrevocable harm or be wiped out completely by the end of WWII (Figure 3).

The second floor called “The Final Solution – 1940-1945” covers the Jews and other minorities deemed undesirable being put into ghettos and sent to concentration camps.78 This section holds the well-known part of the museum, with a pile of shoes stolen from the victims as they arrived at the concentration camps. A striking detail in this section is a tram car, the ones used to transport Jews and others from ghettos to concentration camps. It acts as a bridge transporting the visitor from life in the ghetto to life in the concentration camps, the same transportation actual victims took. Mallory Bubar in her dissertation The Figure of the Child in

Holocaust Representations comments when visitors pass through the tram car, “they are able to visualize the space the victims had to share with hundreds of others. Obviously as they stand there very briefly, with maybe one or two other museum visitors, they cannot actually imagine what these victims went through.”79 As discussed previously in this paper, visitors will never be able to understand what victims went through but they can empathize with them and visualizing the tram car stuffed with deportees can invoke that sense of empathy. The last floor called “The

77 “Permanent Exhibition: The Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/permanent. 7 February 2020. 78 Ibid. 79 Bubar, Mallory. The Figure of the Child in Holocaust Representations. 2020. Pennsylvania State University, PhD dissertation, 165 32 Last Chapter” focuses on liberation, resistance efforts, and the aftermath of living through the

Holocaust for those who were lucky enough to survive.80

The museum must keep visitors engaged throughout the entire permanent exhibit, as that is the information the viewer needs to remember, to carry Holocaust history on into the future.

One way they accomplish this is with the pamphlet the visitors get in the beginning with the face and story of someone who went through the Holocaust to lead them through each section of the exhibit. The person in the pamphlet is chosen to resemble the visitor as much as possible, to form a personal connection to the information being presented. It is easier to put yourself in someone else’s shoes if they look like you or they have similar interests as you do. As you follow that person’s story through their entire experience from living a nice normal life in Europe to being taken from their homes, sometimes never to be seen again, deepens that personal connection and keeps the visitor attentive to the facts, figures and other stories they see as they go through the exhibit. It is important to keep the visitor aware of not just the story in their pamphlet but the stories in everyone else’s as well.

Young discusses the use of this idea in the USHMM as both positive and negative. For one he says it allows people the chance to internalize this story. Young says “For a moment, at least, the victims are dehumanized, invigorated with the very life force of the visitors themselves.”81 The people that were affected by the Holocaust get to live on again the thoughts and memories of a visitor to the museum. As this paper has pointed out, one of the most important aspects of Holocaust memory is to remember everyone whose lives were disrupted by

Nazi persecution and this is one of the many ways that can be done.

80 “Permanent Exhibition: The Holocaust.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/permanent. 7 February 2020. 81 Young, James Edward. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Yale Univ. Press, 2000, 342. 33 However, Young also points out a consequence of this entangling of stories that could confuse the viewer. He says “… it encourages a certain critical blindness on the part of visitors.

Imagining oneself as a past victim is not the same as imagining oneself – or another person – as a potential victim, the kind of leap necessary to prevent other ‘holocausts.’”82 While there is a distinction between imagining oneself as a past victim and a future victim and that they can have a different effect, this connection is the reason people will feel a deeper responsibility to remember their person’s story and the rest of the stories from Holocaust victims. Imagining oneself as a past victim goes hand in hand with imagining oneself as a future victim because when aspects of the past life resemble the present life, other things start to match up as well, like global sentiment regarding Jewish people or other marginalized groups. Once the visitors make that connection, they will realize the importance of remembering the genocide against the Jews and the genocides against others as well.

After the permanent exhibit, visitors can go to the Hall of Remembrance. The hexagonal- shaped Hall of Remembrance, as the museum website says, “is a simple, solemn space designed for public ceremonies and individual reflection.”83 On the walls is the inscription of the names of the concentration camps and death camps that claimed the lives of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, prisoners of war, and many more. Along the walls, visitors can light candles in remembrance of those that died, a tradition in the Jewish faith (Figure 4).

A focal point inside is the eternal flame that sits in front of an inscription from the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah, telling visitors of the importance of remembering and passing on

82 Ibid., 344 83 “Architecture and Art: Hall of Remembrance.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/about-the-museum/architecture-and-art/hall-of- remembrance. 7 February 2020. 34 memory. “Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children.”84 The Hall of Remembrance, as the name says, gives people a way to begin remembering the victims of the Holocaust and acts as an inspiration to keep remembering and to make sure the next generation keeps remembering as well.

Another exhibit is called Daniel’s Story and is a fictional story about Daniel and his family and their journey through the Holocaust (Figure 5). While the main character Daniel is not real, his experiences and the experiences of his family are very much real. Bubar in her dissertation notes, “The pre-adolescent son, Daniel, acts as the narrator for the space by way of a personal diary reminiscent of Anne Frank’s own writings.”85 As previously discussed in this paper, Anne Frank’s diary was a turning point in Holocaust commemoration so this familiarity can connect people to the exhibit. While Anne Frank’s diary was her own story Daniel’s stories belong to actual children and their actual families, as they went through the Holocaust.86 The combining of all of these stories means that younger children, who aren’t old enough to face the main exhibit, can learn a little about many different Holocaust experiences. A knowledge that can be built upon in the future. Made for a younger audience, the exhibit guides children through a timeline of the events of the Holocaust, in ways that they can understand. To ensure that this

84 The Torah: The Five Books of Moses. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963. Print. 85 Bubar, Mallory. The Figure of the Child in Holocaust Representations. 2020. Pennsylvania State University, PhD dissertation, 123 86 “Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.USHMM.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/remember-the-children- daniels-story. 7 February 2020. 35 exhibit doesn’t scare the children or psychologically scar them the curators involved several child psychiatrists and educators to present an experience that children will truly learn from.87

It can be difficult to learn about the Holocaust starting with the mass murder. Most people only know the horrific part, as that is the majority of what is taught in schools and the horrifying is generally what people seem to remember. Starting at a younger age, with storytelling as a way of teaching a lesson and present the Holocaust almost as a picture book, can lay the foundation for further Holocaust research in the future. Not only will children already have some basic knowledge to build on when they do eventually learn about this in school, but they will also want to learn more. Children often lose focus so the exhibit includes items children can touch and interact with as well as realistic noises and voices to keep the children immersed in the exhibit as if they were real. As Bubar states, “because it was created with children in mind, it combines multiple aspects of a complicated topic and compiles them into one narrative.”88 Few adults are as willing to open to feelings as children are, so guiding the young kids through an exhibit can help them relate, connect and empathize with a child who could be just like their friends or just like them. Bubar claims, “for the casual visitor, [the photographs of the family] is yet another opportunity to make them stop and remember that although Daniel did not exist, people like him did.”89

Bubar further suggests that while other forms of Holocaust commemoration move to a digital platform, so should children’s exhibits. She says, “as this shift to a more digitized and interactive experiential approach occurs, it is important to provide an analysis of these

87 Ibid. 88 Bubar, Mallory. The Figure of the Child in Holocaust Representations. 2020. Pennsylvania State University, PhD dissertation, 124 89 Ibid., 170 36 institutions with a focus on child figures, as a primary experiential mediator.”90 Most educational programs are geared toward students so it is crucial that online presentation of Holocaust memory includes the views of children.

The museum has put a large focus on educating every visitor that walks through the museum. To do this, they make exhibits that can put people in a position where they imagine what the victims of the Holocaust were going through and how it must have made them feel. Of course, visitors will never know what it was really like, as only someone who went through it can know how it felt. However, from details like a façade front building, a passage through a tram car, a pile of lost shoes, or a replica of the infamous gate to Auschwitz, the museum creates an engaging experience that leads viewers towards a feeling of empathy for what the victims were suffering before, during and after the war.

The education of Holocaust history does not end with the exhibits. After visitors have been inspired to learn more about the Holocaust, as you can never learn everything in a museum, the USHMM has a reference library that is unmatched by almost any other collection in the world. Anyone can set up a research meeting to examine the archives or talk to a reference librarian about almost any topic relating to the Holocaust. These librarians are also reachable by email, something I utilized in the research for this paper. On the website, you can search their

Holocaust encyclopedia to find information on almost anything Holocaust-related. This museum understands the job isn’t done once the visitor is finished walking through the exhibits, that is just the first part. Giving teachers access to several education tools, researchers access to an almost unlimited supply of information, and everyone easily accessible information about the history or the victims is crucial in the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. One of these

90 Ibid., 126 37 educational tools is a virtual reality tour of small sections of the museum. Adapting to societal shifts, like the heavy emphasis placed on digital media, propels the museums forward in tandem with society to remain up to date and increase the museum’s outreach.

One of the most common themes discussed in other analysis papers of the

USHMM is its Americanization, as it interrelates American history and the Holocaust, despite the events of the Holocaust taking place on mostly European soil. Americanization has been criticized for presenting a very narrow interpretation of the Holocaust, but it isn’t always a bad thing. Marouf Hasian, Jr for one, in his paper Remembering and Forgetting the “Final

Solution”: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum claims the museum makes five arguments in justifying its depiction of the Holocaust: the Allies liberation connected America to the Holocaust; photographic evidence proves the Holocaust existed; millions of Jews and non-Jews were killed; the unwillingness of countries to accept Jewish immigrants played a role in the murder of millions; going through the museum can help prevent future genocide.91 Throughout his paper, he discusses that while the museum is geared toward an

American audience focusing on the fact that Americans helped end the war and liberate the camps, it also, minimally, addresses the negative consequences of America’s non-involvement at the beginning of the war and its reluctance to open its borders to those who were facing certain death.92 The truth is, this museum was made in America for Americans. So, if focusing on the positive and negative roles played by Americans citizens piques the interest of a majority of viewers, without alienating others, so be it, at least they are paying attention.

91 Hasian, Jr, Marouf (2004) “Remembering and Forgetting the “Final Solution”: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage Through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21:1, 64. DOI:10.1080/0739318042000184352 92 Ibid., 76-7 38 Hasian, Jr also acknowledges that many critics worry about the commercialization of the

Holocaust and that many museums omit information that doesn’t match the rhetoric designed by the museum.93 However, the information the USHMM presents is not made up or exaggerated, as

Holocaust deniers claim. The fact of the matter is, it would be impossible for any museum on any topic to include every single detail about every single event that happened. A visit to that museum would take days and almost every visitor would eventually lose interest. That is the reason for an enormous reference library with information on almost every topic relating to the

Holocaust. People can go back and spend time on the aspects that they connected with the most.

The museum has to present the most useful information to reach the most amount of people.

Hasian, Jr points out that the information and artifacts in the USHMM

are all artifacts or structures that supply us with only partial information on the totality of

the Holocaust. But they do provide us with vivid reminders of the importance of

memory-work in the retrieval of the relics and narratives of our traumatic pasts. If these

imperfect visual representations serve as catalysts for continued debates about the

Holocaust or other genocidal events, then these pilgrimages will have helped facilitate,

rather than close off, the preservation of tragic memories.94

If even in a small way, what a visitor sees makes them want to learn more about the people and the events, the museum continued its ongoing role in the preservation of Holocaust memory.

Bubar also touches on this idea of Americanization of the Holocaust in her dissertation.

She references Young’s article “America’s Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity”

93 Ibid., 86 94 Ibid., 88 39 when discussing America’s Holocaust commemoration despite none of the Holocaust occurring on American soil. Bubar quotes Young as he says, “American memorials seem to be anchored not so much in history as in the idea that generated them in the first place.”95 Without the ability for the USHMM, and American memorials in general, to use the location as part of the exhibit, the inside has to get that across and the museum does that by a focus on education.

The USHMM presents engaging exhibits in the physical museum but also offers online education. An expansive website details a history of the Holocaust, a history of antisemitism and more. The website has sections for students on how to learn and or teachers on how to teach the

Holocaust. For schools not in the D.C area, they have virtual tours that can be done with a virtual reality headset or just on the computer to get a feel of the museum and what it offers. As the world heads in a digital direction, museums like the USHMM have to be online as well.

Additionally, the museum has researched thousands of stories that can be told. A permanent exhibit in the museum where they share several at once, changing them regularly, can ensure that as many stories as possible are spread to everyone who visits the museum. Stories are what connect people to other experiences they haven't been through themselves, so to have different people hearing different stories that they can share will family, friends, and classmates will ensure further education of the Holocaust and silence those that still deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

Part of remembering the Holocaust and honoring the Jewish victims that died is to make sure that nothing like that happens again to the Jewish people or any other marginalized group.

The research center at the museum is working to analyze not only the Holocaust but human

95 Bubar, Mallory. The Figure of the Child in Holocaust Representations. 2020. Pennsylvania State University, PhD dissertation, 132 40 nature and societies in general. The research they do applies to every group, in every area of the world, to better all of humanity. Additionally, on the museum website is an entire page with section after section of the state of antisemitism today, what people are saying about it and effective ways to manage that kind of racism in a visitor’s own community. The museum also offers a podcast about different aspects of antisemitism and hate in general. The museum also has the Center for the Prevention of Genocide that analyzes and confronts this type of hate in other cultures around the world.

The USHMM has strengths and weaknesses. Being aware of these weaknesses and making the necessary changes is what helps keeps the memory of the Holocaust alive.

Americanization of the Holocaust is not a negative issue for Holocaust memory, as long it does not portray Americans as the conquering hero that freed the captured when in reality, America’s non-involvement cost many lives. An American portrayal of the Holocaust runs the risk of alienating others that visit the museum. Washington D.C. gets millions of visitors from all over the world and the USHMM is often a common tourist attraction for visitors. However, a good portion of people throughout the world don’t have ability to travel so an ever-increasing digital portrayal of Holocaust memory is imperative for the future of Holocaust commemoration.

Yad Vashem

The only museum that is similar in size and outreach to the USHMM is Yad Vashem, located on the west side of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Israel. Mt Herzl is named after Theodore

Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. The mountain is often referred to as Mt Remembrance, as 41 it also the home to Israel’s national cemetery for Zionist leaders, Israeli leaders, and fallen soldiers. Yad Vashem is a 45-acre museum complex that consists of several different parts, including many memorials, a research facility for exploration into the Holocaust and genocide in general, a synagogue, and more notably the Holocaust History Museum and the Garden of the

Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem is one of the premier sites of Holocaust research and according to Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate “By preserving its Jewish character within the universal context and yet maintaining the authentic individual voice emanating from testimonies, diaries, artifacts, and other documentation, Yad Vashem continues to pave the way for a brighter future.”96

Yad Vashem places a lot of emphasis on the museum’s architecture designed by Moshe

Safdie. The whole structure is a triangular prism, with one end entering the museum and the other opening to a view of modern-day Jerusalem (Figure 6). Only the two ends of the prism stick out of the mountain. The rest of the museum, aside from the very top ridge, is underground.

In her book, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation,

Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich says “Safdie’s building, which lies beneath the earth and occasionally pierces the surface for light and air, suggests viscerally the tremendous effort needed to confront the Holocaust.”97

The inside of the prism, where the museum exhibit lies, gets its light from the glass panel ceiling along the roof, the part that is sticking out of the ground. As visitors first enter the museum, they can see the inside of the prism resembles a tunnel. Through that tunnel, they can

96 Shalev, Avner. “Mission Statement.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/about/mission- statement.html. 26 February 2020. 97 Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, Rutgers University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, 69. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=1651773. 26 February 2020. 42 see the ceiling constricts and lowers as it goes on only to rise and widen at the end, the part that looks at Jerusalem (Figure 7). As they walk through the zig-zag galleries, they can notice the ceiling follows the story. It is wide open at the section on life before the Holocaust and is at its narrowest and lowest at the section on the concentration camps and mass murder and opens up again at the end with the survival of the Jewish people.

The outside architecture of the Holocaust History Museum is made to represent the same journey of the Jewish people. The beginning above ground symbolizes before the Holocaust when Eastern European Jews had a thriving culture full of tradition and good lives. The middle part that appears to have fallen into the mountain represents the Holocaust, a low point for

Jewish people and the world in general. In the end, the Jewish people make it out of the mountain to become a vibrant but different culture full of different traditions in a different place but surviving nonetheless, as is shown by the end opening up to Israel. The notion that society and humanity can start so high and sink so low signals to the visitors that it is important to not let it get that low again. They get the details of these high and low points as they walk through the museum. Absorbing this information at the high, low, then high point again aids the visitor in not only digesting the information but also the type of feelings is associated with the information of a given section.

Before the visitor enters the main galleries, visitors watch a 10-minute video of Jewish life in Europe before the Nazis took over. It is a video by Michael Rovner entitled "I Still See

Their Eyes - The Vanished Jewish World." It leads into the first few sections about the Nazi rise to power, the increasing restrictions on Jewish life, and the ghettoization of the Jewish people.

These sections include many important artifacts. The first section includes a replica of a typical

German-Jewish home before their livelihoods and culture were stripped away and their culture 43 destroyed, reminding people about the normal lives that couldn’t be lived ever again. The second section features diary entries from Dawid Sierakowiak, a young boy from Poland about the effect the Nazi regime had on his family during the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws.98 The section on ghettoization focuses on four ghettos: the Lodz and Warsaw Ghettos in Poland, the Kovno

Ghetto in Lithuania, and the Theresienstadt Ghetto in former Czechoslovakia.

The next two sections provide details about the Einsatzgruppen and the beginning of the

“Final Solution.” The first section focuses on Einsatzgruppe C, and the murder of thousands of

Jews that lived in their community and similar ones across the Third Reich. This section is especially important because it shows visitors that it wasn’t just Nazi soldiers that committed these horrific acts. It was also regular citizens, just like them, that were led to believe the murder of thousands was the right thing to do, proving something like this can happen anywhere.

The next section is about deportation to concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. As the museum website says, “An authentic cross-section of a cattle car forms an emotive part of this exhibit, leading to the final section of the gallery that focuses on the largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.”99 Here the museum shows the “Auschwitz Album” the only surviving video to the arrival to the camp and the selection process that awaited the Hungarian

Jews arriving in 1944.

The photographs were taken by SS officers. This video does two things. One it shows the visitors the systemic process the Nazis had when it came to recording the people that were deported to concentration camps and not immediately chosen for the gas chambers. Second, it shows the harrowing experience of arriving somewhere strange, having your possessions taken

98 “Galleries.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history- museum/galleries.html. 26 February 2020. 99 Ibid. 44 away and watching your fellow Jews being marched off to their death. This video gives evidence of what the Nazis did to the Jewish people, giving visitors faces and emotions to empathize with.

As previously stated in this paper, this is an experience that can be shown but never understood.

However, people can empathize to a point where they understand the importance of what they are seeing.

The last three sections are about Jewish resistance, rescue from non-Jewish people, life in concentration camps, death marches, and life after liberation. The first section gives details on several people who have earned the title of Righteous Among the Nations, including Oskar

Schindler with his real list of names on display. The next section includes testimonies from concentration camp survivors about their harrowing experiences in the camps and on death marches, as well as tales of their liberation. The second to last section of the museum is called

“Return to Life” which I have thought ironic as many Jews had an extremely hard time returning to life, trying to find loved ones and facing the realities that many could not go back to the homes where they once lived their lives, as they were still unwelcome there. The museum concludes with the gallery called “Epilogue – Facing the Loss” which is as the museum website says

“dedicated to an artistic piece that encapsulates Jewish contemporary responses to the horrors and imminent death that was then a daily reality.”100 It is an art installation by Uri Tzaig of a book with turning pages of the thoughts, reactions, and responses of people during that time.

As the last gallery shows, museums like Yad Vashem have the responsibility to remember the events as well as the people. The exhibit, as described in the last gallery “gives expression to the voices of the majority of a community that did not survive to tell their tale, and encourages

100 “Galleries: Epilogue - Facing the Loss.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust- history-museum/galleries/epilogue.html. 26 February 2020. 45 visitors to remember each victim as an individual with a unique existence.”101 This idea applies to the Hall of Names at the end of the exhibit, the collection of every single name and story of the six million Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust. The outer edges of the circular hall have over two million pages of biographies, with enough room for every single victim, should the museum find them all.

As of today, the museum has collected close to four million eight hundred thousand life stories, out of the six million.102 In the center is a cone-shaped structure that reaches to the ceiling with pictures and stories of about 600 victims as the museum website says “represents a fraction of the murdered six million men, women and children from the diverse Jewish world destroyed by the Nazis and their accomplices”103 (Figure 8). The Hall of Names shows visitors, as much as possible, the true loss of Jewish life and all the people that are worth remembering. It also represents the loss of life that could occur should the world let something like this happen again.

One of the things Yad Vashem and Israel is known for is bestowing the honor of being a

Righteous Among the Nations, a non-Jew that risked their own lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. While it is a national honor the State of Israel awards to those they deem worthy, Yad Vashem has the Avenue for the Righteous Among the Nations, a tree-lined pathway to honor those with the title as well as the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations with the names of the recipients on the walls (Figure 9). The planting of a tree, and trees in general, have always played an important role in Jewish culture. Planting a tree in honor of someone’s bar/bat

101 Ibid. 102 “The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, yvng.yadvashem.org/. 26 February 2020. 103 “Hall of Names.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/museum/holocaust-history-museum/hall- of-names.html. 26 February 2020. 46 mitzvah, wedding, birth and other ceremonies is a common thing to do. The trees planted on the

Avenue are in memory of those that have been considered a Righteous Among the Nations, completing one of the main goals of the creators of Yad Vashem, to honor those that helped the

Jews, to inspire the visitors to do the same if they see a marginalized population heading towards the same fate as the Jewish people of Europe.

One of the toughest parts of curating a museum of this magnitude, on a topic as substantial as the Holocaust, is providing as much information as possible without overwhelming the visitor. Yad Vashem is packed full of important information. In his article “The ‘Jewish

Narrative’ in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum,” Amos Goldberg notes, “In this

‘authoritative’ vein, the museum contains only one very long visitors’ path that twists and turns along. The visitor can opt-out at only one point at a midpoint in the display (which is actually an emergency exit) and, unless leaving the museum altogether, cannot skip virtually any of its exhibitions.”104 He goes on to say the museum is loaded with information to present the entirety of the Holocaust but doesn’t have to. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that most people who end up at Yad Vashem already have a basic knowledge of the Holocaust and know what parts are the most important and to pay attention to those. However, if the goal of Holocaust memory is to educate the world about the Holocaust and the importance of remembering the

Holocaust, the necessary information needs to be presented so that everyone can be aware of what happened in the Holocaust.

Goldberg also disagrees with the information that was presented. He says “none of the complexities were translated into the museum displays. On the contrary, the museum makes

104 Amos Goldberg (2012) “The ‘Jewish narrative’ in the Yad Vashem Global Holocaust Museum,” Journal of Genocide Research, (14)2, 198, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2012.677761

47 every effort to get the visitor to acknowledge that the road to the ‘final solution’ was anything but complex.”105 Goldberg also challenges the lack of information about perpetrators and bystanders. He says “the museum represents the deeds without the doers, and thus, even if unintentionally, it elevates the event to the mythic sphere.”106 Additionally, he claims the lack of information on perpetrators means the museum doesn’t address the question of “how did that happen?” He says, “Because the premise, seemingly shared by the museum’s ‘implied narrator and imagined uninformed addressee, is that the Holocaust is an unprecedented if not a unique event, it is one that does not lend itself intuitively to reason.”107

One of the most challenging questions to ask about the Holocaust is how could one human do that to another or why did this happen to assume all the complexities of the Holocaust can be explained in one museum is an overconfident notion. Holocaust study is an area that may never fully answer the questions of how or why. We can learn that neighbors turned on their fellow neighbors for being Jewish because of Nazi propaganda that came at the right time when most people were struggling and looking for someone to blame. We can learn it was because of generations of internalized antisemitism that led to the people to turn on the Jews.

The extent of the Holocaust is so abstract that while the facts are known they can be impossible to understand. People know what happened, but they will never be able to understand how six million Jews and millions of others could be murdered by the Nazis and of others helped them do it or stood by and watched. Those numbers are incomprehensible, even to people that spend their whole lives studying them. The number is just too big. The museum does address the perpetrators and bystanders with the section on the Einsatzgruppen, but it is not “negative” to not

105 Ibid. 195 106 Ibid., 197 107 Ibid. 48 spend more than the necessary amount talking about the perpetrators. Instead of focusing on the

“bad guys”, emphasizing remembering the good people that tried to help the Jews is time well spent. Hopefully, should anything of the sort start to happen again, the narrative on the good people would show visitors that if they aren’t the group that is being attacked, then they should be the good person that helps and not the person that lets it happen. Museums and other forms of

Holocaust memory can be used to inspire education for future generations. People should walk away still thinking about what they saw with a desire to learn more and remember the importance of the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem has three purposes: to remember the Jews that lost their lives, to commemorate the non-Jews that tried to help, and to further the education of Holocaust history.

The Hall of Names is for the victims, the Righteous Among the Nations is for the helpers and the

International School for Holocaust Studies is for the continuing education. The school, as the museum website says, “[is] committed to promoting Holocaust education and transmitting the legacy of the Holocaust to the younger generations,” which, as I have said earlier in this paper, is one of the most important parts of Holocaust memory.108 Educating future generations about the events of the Holocaust and the importance of remembering the victims is what will ensure that people are

Much like the research center at the USHMM, the Yad Vashem Research Institute does extensive research into the Holocaust and genocide in general. Research like this is why people everywhere will know the warning signs and be able to watch out for their own communities.

Their website offers an extensive history of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and its current ties

108 “Education and E-Learning: About the International School for Holocaust Studies.” Yadvashem.org, Yad Vashem, www.yadvashem.org/education/about-school.html. 26 February 2020. 49 with the conflict in the Middle East. The museum website has gathered articles about the Middle

East conflict, antisemitism in general as well as how it appears as Holocaust denial. However, the website could be updated to resemble websites of today. Virtual reality is a great way to connect people that can’t travel to Israel with the museum and everything it has to offer.

Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum is mostly a museum made about Jews for Jews and that probably works for the majority of visitors. However, like the USHMM, if this goal is to educate the world it has to appeal to the to the visitors from all over the globe. A museum just for the Jewish people is reasonable given the circumstances and the location. However, Yad Vashem is a big complex and has room for a separate building for information about non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust as well as other genocides around the world. It is research into all of these genocides that puts humanity on a better path when we can prevent mass murder from happening anywhere on the globe.

Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.

The traveling Auschwitz exhibit, Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away., which premiered in Madrid before coming to New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, is different from the previous two museums I have analyzed thus far, in that there isn’t much architecture to look at, in that it is a traveling exhibit. It is a traveling exhibit that changes to fit the restrictions of each museum it is in. However, its contents are just as important as the permanent exhibit in the

USHMM and the Holocaust History Museum of Yad Vashem. As Blumenthal states “its power is 50 in the containment of its narrative to a set of artifacts left behind by individuals who came to a specific place of horror.”109

The exhibit was first created by a Spanish for-profit company, Musealia. Their Auschwitz exhibition was curated by Holocaust scholars including Robert Jan van Pelt, an Auschwitz historian and writer of the catalog for the exhibit, and Michael Berenbaum, author of the book

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.110 They partnered with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State

Museum for a loan of over 700 artifacts, some of which had never been seen before out of

Poland. The exhibition and the Museum of Jewish Heritage had to be altered for the presentation.

The exhibition comes to New York at the perfect time. The executive director of the New York

City Office of Hate Crimes told CNN, "We have seen a startling increase in swastika vandalism in New York City, which has contributed to the high number of anti-Semitic hate crimes. By studying the Holocaust, students learn about the meaning of this symbol and where stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination can lead.”111

In the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the exhibition consists of three floors, which is different from the presentation on Madrid. As the viewers go through the 20 different sections, they are accompanied by an audio guide that explains the artifacts and shares the stories of the people to which they once belonged. However, before visitors even enter the museum, in front of the doors is a freight car that resembled the ones used to transport victims to Auschwitz from all over the Nazi-occupied territory (Figure 10).

109 Blumenthal, Ralph. “A Visit to the Unfathomable Past of Auschwitz.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/design/auschwitz-exhibition-review-holocaust.html. 5 March 2020. 110 Diroy, Diana. “55,000 Students Have Visited This New NYC Auschwitz Exhibition.” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 June 2019, www.cnn.com/travel/article/auschwitz-exhibition-new-york-city/index.html. 5 March 2020. 111 Horn, Dara. “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 6 June 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/auschwitz-not-long-ago-not-far-away/591082/. 5 March 2020. 51 Inside, the exhibit opens with a quote from the aforementioned survivor Primo Levi, “It happened; therefore, it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.” The exhibit starts with artifacts of what victims would’ve seen as they arrived at Auschwitz, including a freight car wheel and concrete posts that stood outside the camp. It also has a single red shoe display, representing the lives of Holocaust victims once lived, some that leave behind only a single shoe to prove they existed (Figure 11). Opening the exhibit this way prepares visitors for what they are about to see and what it represents.

The first floor goes through the beginning of Oświęcim, the Polish name for a town that was around for centuries before the Nazis came to power.112 The whole exhibit has stories about the period they are presenting to connect the visitor to what life was like for the Jewish people, giving visitors stories they can connect with. Several of these stories are about children or parents losing their children which generally makes people more empathetic than just stories of adults. The story in the first section is about the Haberfield's who went to New York for the

World’s Fair only to be unable to get back to their daughter after the war broke out, a daughter that was murdered in Auschwitz. Putting a story like this, in the beginning, is a way to get people invested right away and keep them engaged throughout the entire exhibit.

The next few sections talk about the Nazis’ rise to power. They discuss the reality of

Jewish involvement in WWI as soldiers of their country, even though Hitler and other German antisemites claimed the Jews did not fight.113 This shows visitors that it doesn’t matter if what leaders say is true, it matters if the citizens believe them. These sections include a startling panoramic photograph of a Nazi rally with thousands of people looking at Hitler, saluting, and

112 Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. May 2019 - August 2020, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York. 113 Ibid. 52 hanging on to his every word. As the audio guide tells the listener, many faces are blurred but the faces in the front row can be seen in detail showing the visitors of the museum that these people weren’t convinced to join the cause out of fear but instead were willing participants to aid the

Nazis with their cause. The first floor also includes a section on non-Jewish victims of the

Holocaust showing visitors that genocide of this degree usually affects many groups of people.

The second floor goes through the restriction of Jewish life, Kristallnacht, the history on the use of T4, the move to concentration camps and the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish question”, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, deportation and arrival at Auschwitz, stories of families in hiding and the blueprint of Auschwitz-Birkenau.114 The second floor displays many artifacts from Auschwitz including a real bunker where prisoners had to sleep. One of the most striking artifacts on display is a baby stroller that someone had as they arrived off the tramcar at

Auschwitz. Artifacts like this show the parts of life families brought with them leaving visitors with the knowledge that victims had no idea what was ahead for them and the reality the inhabitants of those strollers did not make it very far.

The last part of the second floor has a model of the entire layout of Auschwitz, showing how little space the gas chambers took up despite being the end for millions of people115 (Figure

12). It shows visitors the reality of what Auschwitz was and having them confront the truth that while people think many made it past selection, the reality is only 20% of arrivals made it to endure the impossible life in the camps. This section also has models of the gas chambers and how people were led in, killed, and then taken out, showing how methodical the Nazis were with

114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 53 the murder of millions leaving visitors with the realities of how far people can fall when they completely turn on others.

The third floor includes details on the process of being sent to the gas chambers and what those victims would’ve seen, including a reconstruction of the gas chamber door.116 This floor also discusses Kanada, the area where Nazis sent all of the belongings stolen from victims some of which are on display. The audio guide called them “the last fragments of whole existences” as they are reminders of lives and centuries-long culture that was destroyed, imploring visitors to learn about and remember the victims and the culture that died with them.

The third-floor details life in the camp, with stories about the horrid living conditions and day to day life in the camp and a reconstructed building where the inmates would sleep to set the scene for visitors to try to imagine what was happening to these victims. The third floor also features a section with real stories of people who endured medical experiments displaying the medical tools that were used in this torture. No matter how hard they try, visitors will never be able to imagine the depths of horror that occurred with those tools. Also, on the third floor is a section about Jewish and non-Jewish resistance, to the dehumanizing circumstances.

The last two sections of the exhibit are about what happened after liberation. These sections detail the slow process the prisoners had to go through to physically and mentally come back to life, an almost impossible process to go through. Even though they were free, survivors tell visitors the inability to confront an uncertain future. The last section tells the fate of some of the stories that visitors read throughout the exhibit and shows a video of survivors asking people to not feel the hate that was thrown against them, once again imploring the visitors to empathize with their pleas and never feel that kind of hate.

116 Ibid. 54 The very last part of the exhibit is one of the most emotional parts of the exhibit. It is a video called “The Lost World”117 and consists of photos and videos taken of the families, towns, and overall culture of eastern Europe long before the Nazis took over. The people that were looking forward to a future that never was. The lost world of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Jackson discusses a survey done in England that showed “that when teaching about the

Holocaust, Jewish life prior to the Holocaust if often overlooked.”118 Life before the Holocaust is important as it shows Jewish victims were once normal people and this video highlights that. The ending of this video informs viewers that the exhibit is meant to show genocide is a societal choice that people have control over. It is up to the citizens to allow or not allow. As the narrator concludes the video and the entire exhibit “genocide requires a society to believe and conspire together. But the opposite is also true. That same society can, if it chooses, resist.”119

This exhibit places a lot of emphasis on linking every section with real victim’s stories, putting a face to the facts and figures. Being able to connect to specific people throughout the museum keeps visitors more engaged with what they are seeing and hearing. One of the purposes of this paper was to examine why people are disconnecting. The inclusion of real artifacts like baby shoes, strollers, clothes, and other belongings combine with personal stories and real photographs capturing victims' emotions as they arrive at Auschwitz help to increase people’s empathetic response to everything in the exhibit.

One part of this museum that is important in the current cultural climate was the part about the history of antisemitism. It tells visitors about early antisemitism, as anti-Judaism. and

117 Ibid. 118 Jackson, Darius. “'But I Still Don't Get Why the Jews': Using Cause and Change to Answer Pupils' Demand for an Overview of Antisemitism.” Teaching History, no. 153, 2013, pp. 11. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43260623. Accessed 30 Apr. 2020. 119 Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. May 2019 - August 2020, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York. 55 how it eventually evolved into anti-Semitism. It also talks about how centuries before the Nazis took over, the Jewish people were forced to wear a symbol signifying who they were and that before Hitler was even born, German officials had the idea to exile the Jews to Madagascar.

Educating people that antisemitism is nothing new and that many of Hitler’s ideas were the ideas of others who came before him, shows visitors that l events in history repeated themselves during the Nazi regime and could repeat again if we don’t remember everything that happened.

In her review of the exhibit in The Atlantic magazine, Dara Horn questions this need for all of the extremely detailed facts that make the exhibit quite long, such as the quantity of Zyklon

B that was put into the gas chambers.120 She goes to explain that these details can pit the

Holocaust against other acts of hate that aren’t as severe.121 Horn says “everyone must learn about the Holocaust so as not to repeat it. But this has come to mean that anything short of the

Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.”122 She discusses that the attacks on

Jewish communities in places like New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh and the swastikas drawn on the desks in her children’s schools seem like not that big of a deal because if the Holocaust is the measure of the worst it could be, everything else seems sort of trivial.123 After all, it is not even close to being quite as devasting as mass genocide.

Maybe this is what is happening and could be the reason why it seemed to me like the

Pittsburgh attack was one of the first times people truly cared about an attack on Jewish people.

Maybe people tend to not pay too much attention to attacks on Jewish people because they know it has been so much worse so everything else it not severe. Most likely it is because antisemitism

120 Horn, Dara. “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 6 June 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/auschwitz-not-long-ago-not-far-away/591082/. 5 March 2020. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 56 has been part of the cultural subconscious for generations, dormant but still there. People don’t even know they are anti-Semitic until they are faced with a situation where it comes out. This ingrained antisemitism has ties to the Holocaust but is also significantly influenced by the history presented in this exhibit as well as the history discussed earlier in this paper. Education on the importance of remembering the Holocaust can fight against this subconscious hatred and convince people to remember the Jewish people who suffered because of it as well the Jews and other marginalized groups that still suffer from it today.

With antisemitism becoming more conscious than subconscious, the presentation of true events is more important than ever. Perspective shifts like the one Hannah Arendt pointed out in her video testimony shown in the exhibit in the section “The Expulsion of the Jews” where she says “[it was] not about what our enemies did but what our friends did.”.124 This shows visitors that not all perpetrators were the members the leaders of the Nazi party, but were also friends and neighbors. Or the comment from Chaim Weizman when he talked of the Jews attempt to emigrate to other places. He said there were “two sorts of countries, those that want to expel

Jews and those that won’t admit them.”125 The fact that neighbors turned against neighbors or that countries like the United States didn’t want to accept many Jewish refugees, refugees that were sent back and killed, are the things we have to look out for in our society today. Every small detail helps to set the scene of that time and those small details are what build to the big ones.

In an exhibit review with the Wall Street Journal, Edward Rothstein says “[in] the introductory section, Jews seem like afterthoughts, secondary to more fundamental political

124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 57 hatreds.”126 He says for him there wasn’t enough focus on the pure hatred the Nazis had for

Jewish people.127 When an exhibit tries to include other marginalized groups, they receive backlash too. Most people that go to a Holocaust exhibit know that the Jews were the main targets and don’t know as much about the other victims. There is not a perfect museum or perfect exhibit. All the curators of these museums can do is try their best to educate people and give people access to any information they may want and I think the Auschwitz exhibit has done that.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Amanda Lanceter, a Director of Curriculum and

Instruction at the museum to ask a few questions about the exhibit. When I asked her if she had seen the kind of disconnect my thesis is analyzing she said their education approach keeps people engaged but also that an exhibit like this is a “self-selecting experience” so people don’t go there because it’s the main tourist attraction, like the USHMM and Yad Vashem.128 People go there wanting to learn and already prepared to pay attention to the exhibit.129 Most often visitors either have a pretty good existing knowledge base or go with the purpose of learning more.

I also asked her what are the other issues she notices about visitors. Lanceter responded that it seemed like people had a general lack of knowledge about the nuances of the Holocaust experience. People knew about concentration camps and thought that was it.130 They didn’t have as much exposure to people in hiding, people that escaped, or people that resisted. She said the museum wants to teach kids that it’s not just Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel.131 This is in line with the lack of knowledge discussed in Horn’s article. She says “despite the 2 million annual visitors

126 Rothstein, Edward. “An Auschwitz Exhibition Fails the Jews.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 11 May 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/an-auschwitz-exhibition-fails-the-jews-11557572400. 5 March 2020. 127 Ibid. 128 Lanceter, Amanda. Interview. By Amanda Taylor. 26 November 2019. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 58 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, two-thirds of Millennials in one recent poll were unable to identify what Auschwitz was.”132 With this exhibit, hopefully, those staggering numbers will change. With the information in the exhibit and the education programs they have for visiting schools, Lanceter said her main goal is to “help students make better choices.”133

I also asked her what programs the museum offers other than the exhibit to keep people engaged. One program they have is something the museum calls Heritage Testimonies. They play real footage of a survivor telling their story, accompanied by their descendent in real-time helping them tell it and give an idea of who the survivor truly was. This helps lessen the disconnect people have when they just see a video. Although still moving, having a live person sharing their emotions and stories of their parents or grandparents limits the disinhibition effect, as the audience can see and relate to the emotion, body language, and real-time presentation of the descendent.

Another program is one that connects with the USC Shoah Foundation. The Shoah

Foundation created an artificial intelligence (AI) experience where people look at a hologram of a survivor and can ask the hologram questions. The AI algorithm searches their recorded testimony and answers the questions being asked. The more they get similar questions the better the answers get. Having a tool like this makes it possible to always engage in conversation with a survivor, making the experience that much more personal. Talking to someone face to face, or in this case, face to hologram brings people in and helps them remember the stories they are being told.

132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 59 Although this was a museum about Auschwitz and not the Holocaust as a whole, there could be more about the people that saved Jews from going to Auschwitz, like the Righteous

Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. Showing visitors, they have a choice to try and do the right thing is important to getting the message across to people that it is on them to help fight this high level of prejudice.

Although the exhibit is not a permanent part of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the museum has many programs to educate young students about the Holocaust, hate, and genocide in general. A museum can only do so much, but what the museum does offer for education in the regular classroom is a planned-out curriculum for teachers to use from elementary to middle school as well as educator workshops to ensure Holocaust education is efficient and effective.

The museum seems acutely aware of the issues with Holocaust denial and disconnects to

Holocaust memory that we are seeing in the world today. Every detail is important for the proper education of Holocaust history and the preservation of Holocaust memory. The presentation of these details, however, is the tricky part. Too many is overwhelming, too little doesn’t get the point across. The use of storytelling, using the experiences of survivors to explain all the small details is an effective, engaging way to connect people to the facts. However, the stories and facts can get redundant. With the main focus on the story, with information blurbs filling the gaps, an exhibit can present the events of the Holocaust and the importance of Holocaust memory in a way different from other exhibits where the victims guide their own story.

Holocaust education is of the utmost importance as a way to commemorate Holocaust victims and survivors. The different presentations made by these museums offer different interpretations for visitors to experience. The analysis done in this paper displays ways to alter commemoration to fit today’s society. An improved online presence can keep the museums up to 60 date with the world today. Virtual tours can reach people from all over the world who may not be able to make it to the respective museums. A website that guides visitors on what the museum offers and of Holocaust history will further Holocaust education for new generations of students.

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Chapter 4

Analysis of Memorials

Memorials have to be treated much differently than museums. While museums have the opportunity to have someone view information for hours, memorials tend to keep people’s interest for short periods so they have to get a lot across in that short time. As Young points out, the viewer plays the most important role. He says “it is the visitors to monuments who necessarily complete the memorial act, who animate the memorial in their visits.”134 Therefore, memorials should be made with the visitors in mind and how the visitors might react, respond, and connect with the memorial while doing its job to memorialize the subject. In this section, I will be analyzing The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Pinkas

Synagogue in Prague, and the Stolperstein, Stumbling Stones, throughout Europe.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The idea for a memorial to the Jewish Holocaust victims in Berlin was first discussed in

1988 by a group led by Lea Rosh, demanding a memorial for Jewish Holocaust victims, says

Richard Bernstein in his article Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin.135 In February of 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former ministerial gardens was chosen as the site of this memorial and in early 1998, the proposal from Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra was chosen

134 Young, James E. The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory. The American Jewish Committee, 1995, 20. 135 Bernstein, Richard. “Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 May 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/world/europe/holocaust-memorial-opens-in-berlin.html. 30 March 2020. 62 with Eisenman becoming the lead architect that.136 Construction began April of 2003 opening to the public in May of 2005. The memorial is a 4.7-acre space filled with 2,711 concrete stelae of differing heights arranged in a maze-like pattern, according to Joachim Schloer in his book

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Berlin137 (Figure 13). The blocks are used to represent the victims murdered by the Nazi regime, their differing heights representing all the different types of people whose lives were taken. Their plain, gray exterior showing the treatment these victims suffered when the Nazis reduced them to just a number.

According to Eisenman, the monument “illustrates how an apparently ordered system loses its connection with human reason if it becomes too big and grows beyond its intended proportions,” a metaphor for the Nazi regime.138 Although the blocks look like a maze, Christoph

Heinrich says “nowhere inside do you lose your bearings… it is not a monument that attempts to overwhelm… but is a walk-in sculpture that opens up to let you in at the edges… and draws you in.”139 It allows visitors to freely walk through and contemplate what it means for the victims that died and for the world today. Wolfgang Thierse, Bundestag President at the time, says the

“great emotional and sensory force that the museum exerts” is what makes this memorial so moving.140 The memorial is certainly thought-provoking about how people’s whole being could be reduced to something as mundane as a gray, cold concrete block.

While in theory and on paper, the design makes sense, it has been surrounded in controversy since the opening. People were upset that the memorial was dedicated to only the

136 “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, www.stiftung-denkmal.de/denkmaeler/denkmal-fuer- die-ermordeten-juden-europas-mit-ausstellung-im-ort-der-information/. 30 March 2020. 137 Schloer, Joachim. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Berlin. Prestel, 2005, 35. 138 Ibid., 41 139 Ibid., 39 140 Ibid., 41 63 Jewish victims and not any other victims of Nazi persecution, as Richard Brody describes in his article for the New Yorker “The Inadequacy of Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of

Europe.’”141 Without the ability for section after section and room after room, memorials can’t possibly cover everything related to the Holocaust, and as Jews were the main victims of this genocide.

If commemoration of other groups that have been discriminated against is insufficient, memorials can be built to honor them too, which the Foundation of the Memorial to the

Murdered Jews of Europe has done. In Berlin, they have created memorials for the homosexual victims, Roma and Sinti victims as well as a memorial for the victims of euthanasia. The acknowledgment of these victims furthers the goal of Holocaust memory to remember everyone that was murdered and ensure that no group has to go through mass persecution.

People also have issues with the lack of victims' names, concentration camp information, and facts and figures of the Holocaust.142 However, not every memorial has to mention every part of the Holocaust, every statistic, and so on. Additionally, the upsetting truth is a memorial with the names of every European victim is impossible for two reasons. One reason is that space that big doesn’t exist and if it did, it would probably be way too overwhelming to look at. The second and more distressing reason is that we don’t yet know all the names of the victims. The

Hall of Names at Yad Vashem is still missing about two million names, names that might be never be found. A quote from the New York Times architecture review “A Forest of Pillars,

Recalling the Unimaginable” from critic Nicolai Ouroussoff explains why the stones are enough

141 Brody, Richard. “The Inadequacy of Berlin's ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.’” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-inadequacy-of-berlins-memorial-to-the-murdered- jews-of-europe. 30 March 2020. 142 Ibid. 64 the way they are. He said the memorial, “is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality – showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion."143

While the stones stand to represent the millions that were killed, without signifying information, that representation could be lost on people. The title, Memorial to the Murdered

Jews of Europe, does little to explain the memorial’s design. There is a sign for hours of operation but that’s it, and those hours are for a small museum underneath, not the memorial itself. Without a sign that explains the purpose of the memorial and the meaning of the stones, people will have no idea the strength and power they hold for all the people that were lost.

Abstract design can often be hard to connect to or relate to, especially something as blank as concrete stones. The memorial could be very powerful and moving if people knew what they were looking at and what it was supposed to represent.

While it is easy to assume the title, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, would lead people to know it is all about the Holocaust, that assumption is dangerously overconfident. The people that care about the Holocaust and care about the Jewish people know what the Holocaust is and can infer what the memorial is showing. However, as The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany’s study showed, the general population is not as up to date on Holocaust history and won’t know what they are looking at or properly connect to it.

Brody says, “The reduction of responsibility to an embarrassing, tacit fact that “everybody knows” is the first step on the road to forgetting.”144 Some people ignore the facts and reality of

143 Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 May 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/design/a-forest-of-pillars-recalling-the-unimaginable.html. 30 March 2020. 144 Ibid. 65 the Holocaust and so assuming everybody will just know is what makes room for Holocaust deniers to come in and spread their position on history.

An abstract design can be quite powerful and reflect the unrepresentability of the genocide if everyone has a base of understanding of what the abstract represents. However, the lack of sign and lack of explanation, I believe, is a contributing factor to the issues highlighted in the “Yolocaust” project. Without the ability to empathize with victims or feel the need to remember those people, a memorial will have little to no effect. People either don’t know, have forgotten, or are ignoring the purpose of the memorial. Doing yoga, running around, having picnics, and playing Pokémon GO is not what the memorial is for. It invites the contemplation and reflection on the crimes of the past and its victims, their presence in the midst of our present lives. Once that meaning is lost, the memorial is just a park with concrete blocks.

A memorial of this size presented this way is meant to rouse a feeling of sadness and discomfort. Looking at rows and rows of concrete blocks that are shaped similar to coffins brings visitors to the conclusion that something upsetting is being represented. As a Holocaust memorial, the goal is that people see the lost lives in all of those blocks and feel the need to remember what led to this outcome. From there, they can visit the informational exhibit underneath the memorial or research the many museums online to remember those that lost their lives, remember what happened, and remember why is it so important to remember any of it in the first place, so that it doesn’t happen again. 66 Pinkas Synagogue

Since the end of WWII, Prague has been a city with a historic Jewish Quarter. Hitler had designated Prague as the city for a museum to the Jewish population he planned to decimate, so much of the Jewish structures and artifacts remained intact. Prague synagogues were able to save hundreds of Torahs from around Europe from destruction and send them to synagogues around the world after the war. In the Jewish Quarter of Prague lies a synagogue that is not just a synagogue but something else entirely.

Pinkas Synagogue was once owned by the prominent Prague Jewish family, Horowitz. It was turned into a familial synagogue in 1535.145 By the 17th century, it was used as a synagogue for the local congregation and included a women’s gallery, as back then women could not sit with the men but had to sit in a gallery above them. After WWII, they began to construct a memorial for the Czech Jews that were killed by the Nazis.146 In 1960, the memorial opened to the public. The walls inside have all of the names of the almost 78,000 Czech Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust (Figures 14, 15). Organized first by town name, then familial name and then first name, the memory of those victims are preserved for as long as the memorial is still standing.

This design can help visitors put the number of deaths into some perspective. They can then try to imagine if their entire hometowns were wiped off the map, their families, and neighbors taken from their homes and sent away to their deaths. Looking at the walls, visitors can see the harsh reality that some towns lost most, if not all, of their Jewish population. One of

145 “Pinkas Synagogue.” World Monuments Fund, World Monuments Fund, www.wmf.org/project/pinkas- synagogue. 30 March 2020. 146 Ibid. 67 the main mental leaps people will never be able to make when it comes to the Holocaust is the number six million. It is nearly impossible to visualize six million of anything, let alone people.

Pinkas Synagogue helps people invision a small percentage of that number. Floor to ceiling names can be representative of the entire six million.

If Pinkas has 78,000 names, there would have to be a street of about 77 Pinkas

Synagogues for the name of every victim that was killed. A smaller, more digestible number helps people begin to understand the true loss that was suffered. The World Monuments Fund, who helped Pinkas Synagogue rebuild after it suffered extensive damage in a flood in 2002, said the synagogue “is a reminder of the Jewish community that once flourished in Prague.”147

Visitors that realize this is just one small country, can begin to think about all the other European countries and their Jewish victims, hopefully, researching them as well and remembering all the victims of the Holocaust.

This is not the only part of the memorial. The first floor includes an exhibit to Freidl

Dicker-Brandeis and the children in the Theresienstadt ghetto. As the Jewish Museum in Prague website describes, the exhibition is full of drawings Dicker-Brandeis had children draw to try and help them cope with the harsh realities of their new life in the ghetto and to remember the happier times they had at their old homes.148 Some of the drawings were upsetting while some were hopeful showing us a look into some of the minds of young children going through the

Holocaust.

147 Ibid. 148 Praze. “Children's Drawings from the Terezín Ghetto, 1942-1944: Židovské Muzeum v Praze.” Jewish Museum in Prague, Jewish Museum in Prague, www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/explore/permanent-exhibitions/children-s- drawings-from-the-terezin-ghetto-1942-1944/. 30 March 2020. 68 Under each picture are the names of the artists, as well as their birth dates and death dates. A drawing by two brothers is on display. Their death date is the same which probably means they were probably gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz, such was the eventual fate of most of the children who made these drawings as well as Dicker-Brandeis herself. She had the forethought to hide these drawings before her deportation so that people would know and remember her and these kids. Like we saw in the museums when children are involved, especially their belongings like these deeply personal drawings, people are drawn in and more connected to what they are viewing. Memorials like these hopefully make visitors think about and remember what happened in the Holocaust, for the 1.5 million Jewish children that were murdered, millions of others, and the future generations that won’t have to suffer the same fate.

While Pinkas Synagogue lies prominently in the Prague Jewish quarter, it seems underrepresented in Holocaust education. Travelers that visit Prague can go see it but those that aren’t able to travel have limited exposure with the memorial. While the Memorial to the

Murdered Jews of Europe is an open-air memorial susceptible to the sounds of a city, Pinkas

Synagogue is an enclosed space that can choose the sounds that the visitors hear and can use that as a tool to influence how a visitor feels as they walk through. To be an effective vehicle for

Holocaust memory, Pinkas Synagogue has to get its name and mission out and appeal to not just the visitors of Prague but also people from the rest of the world. People will respond if they know what it is and who it is for. One way to do this is with an online webpage that connects all of these memorials and museums.

The thousands of names on the walls of the Synagogue serve two main purposes. One is to remember the lives and towns that were destroyed in Czechoslovakia. The second is to remember the six million Jews from all over Europe that lost their lives and their towns. This 69 presentation of remembrance urges people to think of their neighbors and their towns and how it would look different if all the minority groups were rounded up and removed from society.

Stolpersteine

If you ever have the good fortune to walk around the streets of Europe, you may notice brass blocks in the street with names and dates. These would be part of a project from German artist Gunter Demnig. In what he calls Stolpersteine or stumbling stones in English, he commemorates Holocaust victims from every background, whether they be Jewish, Roma, political activists, and more, by indicating important places where they once lived their lives

(Figure 16). In an article called “Man behind Holocaust memorial cobblestones sees no end to his work” Demnig says “I realized that many people didn't know anything about the fate of people from their neighborhoods.”149 As authors Carolin Eckenfels and Alvise Armellini say, “he decided to return the victims of the Nazis to their homes, figuratively, and give the neighborhoods back the names they lost.”150

Demnig’s project was inspired by a woman he met in Cologne that said she was unaware of just how many Holocaust victims were from her home town. Since then, he has laid down 70,000 stones with plans to add more stones not just in Europe but in the rest of the world.151 He chose the name Stolpersteine because, as he puts it, “You don't fall down, you

149 Eckenfels , Carolin, and Alvise Armellini. “Man behind Holocaust Memorial Cobblestones Sees No End to His Work.” Dpa International, Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, 28 Jan. 2019, www.dpa-international.com/topic/man- behind-holocaust-memorial-cobblestones-sees-end-work-urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:190124-99-707427. 4, April 2020. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 70 stumble in your head and in your heart."152 His stones lie outside buildings everywhere pointing out where victims once lived, worked, or studied. It includes their name and their fate after they were removed from society.

Demnig relies on the research and knowledge of the inhabitants of the towns and cities he visits to know where and for whom he has to place a stone. One of the people that helped him was Hendrik Czeczatka of Berlin. He said “everybody in the first place is responsible, individually, for remembering… All of us must continue to insist that Nazis are not welcome, that we must keep the memory alive and learn from our history so that it does not happen again."153 Including the local inhabitants in his process helps them to connect to his project and encourages them to spread the word about the project and the lives they are commemorating.

Helmut Loelhoeffel, coordinator of the project in his town told NPR “Six million Jews were killed, murdered. The stumbling blocks make clear that it was one plus one plus one plus one. It makes clear that they were all individuals,” once again making these victims more than just a number.154 People can have a hard time remembering or connecting to a statistic. They can, however, connect to a name, a family, and a town.

Placing the stones outside of the places victims once lived their normal lives helps show residents and visitors alike the lives that were destroyed in the Holocaust. To see that so many victims lived or worked in the places that people still live and work connects the past to present.

It reminds residents and visitors that the lives they are living today were once the lives of

Holocaust victims who had their lives taken. The creation of such a deep personal connection,

152 Ibid. 153 Westervelt, Eric. “Stumbling Upon Mini Memorials To Holocaust Victims.” NPR, NPR, 31 May 2012, www.npr.org/2012/05/31/153943491/stumbling-upon-miniature-memorials-to-nazi-victims. 4, April 2020. 154 Ibid. 71 like that of Volker Spitzenberger who saw Demnig lay a stone right in front of her house for a victim that lived there not so long ago, gives people a stronger tie to those victims and then victims in general, making sure they are remembered forever.155

Like any other version of memory, the Stolpersteine project is not without controversy.

Many criticize their placement on the ground, claiming that to have people trample over other stones degrades the memory of the people they are memorializing. Munich even banned the project, opting for plaques instead. Of this controversy Demnig says, the Nazis weren’t kicking victims they were brutally murdering them. Thinking ahead, Demnig included a way to make sure anyone who does kick or trample over the stones just brightens the memory of those victims. His design is so that when someone walks over the stones of kicks the stones to rides their bikes over the stones, it polishes them making them shinier and better than they were before.156

The Stolpersteine, do, however, face a similar problem that Pinkas Synagogue faces, of being underrepresented in Holocaust education. These stones could not be more personal as it highlights the lives that were just being lived and the people and families that lived all over

Europe before being murdered by the Nazis. It gives people an easy opportunity to connect with a Holocaust victim if they can’t anywhere else. However, if people don’t know to look down and watch out for these stones, they will miss the memory of all of these victims.

155 Apperly, Eliza. “'Stumbling Stones': a Different Vision of Holocaust Remembrance.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vision-of- holocaust-remembrance. 4, April 2020. 156 Eckenfels, Carolin, and Alvise Armellini. “Man behind Holocaust Memorial Cobblestones Sees No End to His Work.” Dpa International, Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, 28 Jan. 2019, www.dpa-international.com/topic/man- behind-holocaust-memorial-cobblestones-sees-end-work-urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:190124-99-707427. 4, April 2020. 72 One way to alleviate this issue is to have these memorials, and others like it, included on a webpage sponsored by the larger museums like the USHMM and Yad Vashem. The world is heading in a digital direction and so should the presentation of Holocaust memory. The USHMM already has a limited virtual reality tour of the museum for classroom use so why not expand that to include other presentations of Holocaust memory as well. However, there have been some questions about the ethics of digital representation of Holocaust victims as putting them on the web makes them number once again. However, Todd Presner, in his article “The Ethics of the

Algorithm,” studied this possibility as it pertains to the Shoah Foundation Visual History

Archive and claims, “computational or algorithmic analysis can be ethical precisely because it takes into account the fullness of the archive insofar as all indexed data related to the narrative of every survivor is part of the analysis.”157 His analysis shows that while the victims and survivors are a number in the computer, their individuality is still intact and can still show the diverse experiences of the Holocaust. The task of creating web pages for every Holocaust memorial in existence, the presentation of various forms of Holocaust memory will increase the ability for visitors to find memorials that best fits with their individual style of learning.

Now more than ever Demnig understands the importance of his work. He talks about the need to fight against the German alt-right party who say that remembering the Holocaust isn’t important.158 The same could be said of the Neo-Nazi movement here in America. He understands that people around the world have to do whatever they can to push forward

Holocaust memory and teach its importance to those who don’t yet understand. His project is one way of accomplishing this goal. Showing people that the victims of the Holocaust once lived the

157 Presner, Todd. “The Ethics of the Algorithm.” Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, Harvard University Press Press, 2016, p. 199. 158 Ibid. 73 normal lives they are currently living, can reinforce the fact that the Holocaust was perpetrated against normal people by normal people, something the world seems to be forgetting.

The Stolpersteine brings something different to Holocaust memory than the museums and memorials previously discussed. It marks not where the victims were shoved into a ghetto or murdered in a concentration camp but where they lived and worked before it all went wrong. It memorializes the good parts of the victim’s lives not just the sad and horrifying parts. While it is important to remember that part of the Holocaust, many people glaze over the lives of the victims before the war. Visitors can’t relate to being in a concentration camp or being shunned away from society, but they can relate to living in a house near a park where they can play with friends or working in a building close to the restaurant where they could eat lunch.

Rehumanizing the victims in this manner paints a whole picture of their lives and shows visitors that the most normal of people were still betrayed and murdered. As the visitors pictures their own lives at that moment, they realize how much they have to lose and believe the importance of remembering the Holocaust.

The memorials mentioned in this thesis have the potential to inspire many to remember the Holocaust and its victims. To accomplish this goal, however, work needs to be done to ensure people understand what they are looking at or know about these memorials in the first place. In a society with increasing antisemitism and increasing Holocaust denial, memorials like these need to be accessible in more than just physical location. An online presence with a history of the Holocaust, how the memorial relates to the country it's in, what the memorial is doing for the future of Holocaust commemoration and a virtual tour of the memorial and the surrounding area could make the memorials and their goals known all over the world so that people never forget the Holocaust and the Holocaust victims. 74 Conclusion

Antisemitism has been on the rise and has gotten more aggressive. This worries many

Holocaust scholars around the world, as this also means the voices of Holocaust deniers are being heard more and more. One of the ways to quiet those voices is for effective methods of

Holocaust memory to show people that those deniers are wrong. People need to know the

Holocaust did happen and its events and victims are worth remembering. Antisemitism is nothing new but it’s something that cannot continue. Soon, we won’t have any Holocaust survivors around to tell their stories so we have to be able to rely on other effective ways to remember them and what they went through.

The museums have to be able to balance the presentation of important information with the attention spans of many museum visitors and present the pertinent information with the stories of real victims and survivors so that those visitors can connect to someone and have someone with which to empathize. Memorials have to accomplish this goal differently than museums. Visitors have to know what to look for and understand what they are seeing and who it is representing. Connecting to victims of the holocaust this way can also help people feel the responsibility to remember these victims and their experiences.

The development of a singular platform linking these museums and memorials, as well as the many others, will make these different versions of Holocaust commemoration available to the majority of the world. Not everyone can travel to visit these sites in person so a presentation online will connect them to these museums and memorials. This includes teachers who want to expand Holocaust education in their classrooms and anyone else who wants to learn more about the Holocaust and contribute to the preservation of Holocaust memory. Combining all forms of

Holocaust memory, whether it be museums, memorials, films and so on, on one digital place 75 gives rise to a whole new era of Holocaust memory. People can use this platform to “travel” to different countries and see how Holocaust memory can differ based on the place it is in. They can feel how powerful it can be to walk around the remnants of a concentration camp and feel the history there. Virtual reality is an amazing tool to help accomplish this. Walking around museums and concentration camp museums as if you are really there can open so many doors for getting more people involved in Holocaust commemoration.

The research is not done here. The lack of empathetic response might not be the only reason people are disconnecting from portrayals of Holocaust memory. Further research should examine other reasons for this desensitization of Holocaust memory. Remembering the

Holocaust benefits everyone in society and is of the utmost importance in the current antisemitic global social climate.

76

Appendix Photographs of Museums and Memorials

USHMM Exterior

Figure 1: The exterior of the Museum on the 14 street side. USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020.

77 USHMM Hall of Witness

Figure 2: The Hall of Witness, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020. USHMM Name Bridge

Figure 3: Detail of an interior bridge at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the names of victims etched in glass, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020. 78

USHMM Hall of Remembrance

Figure 4: The Hall of Remembrance, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020.

USHMM Daniel’s Story

Figure 5: Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story, USHMM, Washington D.C. ushmm.org. 28 April 2020. 79 Yad Vashem Exterior Architecture

Figure 6: Aerial View of Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020.

Yad Vashem Interior 80

Figure 7: Interior View of the Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020.

Hall of Names

Figure 8: The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020. 81 Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations

Figure 9: Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. yadvashem.org. 28 April 2020.

Auschwitz Exhibit Tram Car

Figure 10: Taylor, Amanda. “Auschwitz Exhibit Tram Car.” 2019. JPG

82 Auschwitz Exhibit Single Red Shoe

Figure 11: Taylor, Amanda. “Auschwitz Exhibit Red Shoe.” 2019. JPG.

Auschwitz Exhibit Model

Figure 12: Taylor, Amanda, “Auschwitz Exhibit Model.” 2019. JPG

83 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Figure 13: Stelae field, Stiftung Denkmal, Berlin. stiftung-denkmal.de. 28 April 2020

Pinkas Synagogue Interior

Figure 14: Ornate Vaulted Ceiling.2013. wmf.org. 28 April 2020

84 Pinkas Synagogue Interior Close-up

Figure 15: Pinkas Synagogue. welcometoprague.cz 28 April 2020

Stolpersteine

Figure 16: Katz, Jeffrey. Brass bricks known as Stolperstein, or "stumbling stones," in front of a home in Raesfeld, Germany, where five members of a single family were forcibly removed by the Nazis. Across Germany, the stones commemorate the millions of victims

85

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ACADEMIC VITA

Amanda Taylor Education

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE | MAY 2020 | PENN STATE UNIVERSITY, SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE · Major: Accounting · Minor: Information Systems Management · Study Abroad, Institute for the International Education of Students, London, England, Spring 2018

MASTER OF ACCOUNTING | MAY 2020 | PENN STATE UNIVERSITY · Five year integrated, highly selective, undergraduate, graduate program

Experience

INTERN | CITRIN COOPERMAN, NYC OFFICE | SUMMER 2019 · Shadowed tax, audit and business advisory professionals to gain insight into their everyday tasks. · Reviewed new tax law with a tax professional. · Assisted in the preliminary steps of an IRS audit. · Familiarized with accounting software such as Quickbooks and Caseware.

JOB COACH | NEW YORK STATE COMMISION FOR THE BLIND | JULY-AUGUST 2018 · Worked as a job coach to a young adult with Cerebral Palsy. · Adapted office tasks and procedures such as filing and typing to accommodate her limited mobility. · Helped her become used to these skills so she can apply them to future employment situations.

FRONT END/OFFICE | COUNTRY MARKETS OF WESTCHESTER | 2011-PRESENT · Developed and maintained strong personal ties with fellow employees and frequent customers. · Managed store policy regarding the scanning and pricing of goods. · Developed a strategic marketing plan to appeal to urban young adults through social media. · Performed office responsibilities including filing, mailing out bills and calling in payroll.

CASHIER | MCLANAHAN’S DOWNTOWN MARKET | 2016 – PRESENT · Provide guidance to new employees as one of the senior members of the cashiering team. · Instrumental in maintaining standard operations during the high frequency events. · Perform daily operations including the handling of large amounts of money.

Skills

· Microsoft Office Suite · Customer service · Leadership · Communication