The Firebombing of the Terre Haute Holocaust Museum a Hoosier Community Responds to an Assault on Collective Memory

The Firebombing of the Terre Haute Holocaust Museum A Hoosier Community Responds to an Assault on Collective Memory WILLIAM B. PICKETT he events of a night in November 2003 in Terre Haute, Indiana, re- T minded local citizens that historical truth, though often unsettling, is also precious-and that its preservation keeps us in contact with essential principles of human dignity and morality. That night an arsonist destroyed a small museum dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. The identity and intent of the arsonist remains un- known, but it is doubtful that the response this violent act elicited was the one intended. In the days and weeks that followed, a sizeable group of citizens, including thousands of school children, came forward to of- fer support. Using newspaper articles, school fundraising activities, and electronic mail, they had within four months obtained donations sufficient to begin to rebuild the museum. By their spontaneous, posi- tive response to an act of hate, these citizens created a new and consid- erably larger awareness in their community of the importance of the museum and its founder, a Holocaust survivor. They also revealed an William B. Pickett is a professor of history at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 100 (September 2004). 0 2004, Tiustees of Indiana University 244 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY awareness of the nature and causes of genocide-something they had gained from a variety of sources, including books and articles, Hollywood films, television programs, the Internet, curricular reform in the schools, visits to a newly created national Holocaust museum, and by 2003, perhaps most important, from continued violent assaults on civil societies by terrorist groups and brutal regimes. The cities and small towns of Indiana and Illinois are filled with ar- chitecture and sculpture that commemorate politicians, authors, and wars. In Crawfordsville, seventy miles to the north of Terre Haute, for example, stands the birthplace (a white, two-story, neo-classical mansion) of Henry S. Lane, the United States senator who nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at the Republican convention of 1860. Crawfordsville also boasts the home and museum of Lew Wallace, Civil War Union general and author of Ben Hur. Greencastle, thirty miles to the northeast, houses DePauw University, formerly Indiana Asbury Institute, a nineteenth-century Meth- odist seminary. The institute’s original building is still in use. On the nearby town square stands a monument to a different aspect of the city’s history: the sacrifices of local soldiers in World War 11. A German V-1 buzz bomb, one of the aerial weapons that Nazi Germany used to terrorize Great Brit- ain in the 1940s, rests, now inert, on a concrete podium above U.S. High- way 231 as it loops around the Putnam County Courthouse. Terre Haute boasts a similarly rich historical culture. The comfort- able two-story, Victorian frame house that was the home of Eugene V. Debs, four-time Socialist candidate for president at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a living museum. Vigo County’s memorial to its war veterans was, for many years, a Korean War-vintage F-84 fighter bomber (the first of its type capable of carrylng an atomic bomb) parked on a corner of the courthouse lawn. This strangely-out-of-place aircraft re- minded local residents of the sacrifices made by their young men over fifty years ago in Korea. Recently, a group of citizens working with veterans and Indiana State University designed and constructed a new veterans’ memorial plaza at the courthouse, moving the F-84 to a less prominent location. Such is the physical fabric of American communities, a nexus of ob- jects from the past that provides clues to history and its lessons. The nation’s founding fathers considered an educated citizenry essential to the sur- vival of individual freedom. Hoosier children begin to learn the history of their state and country in the fourth grade. Illinois children also learn about the Holocaust, something the Illinois legislature mandated more than a decade ago. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 245 CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute shortly after it was firebombed on November 18, 2003. A spray-painted message, “Remem- ber Timmy McVeigh,’ left by the arsonist is partly visible at the right. Photograph by Mary Wright, courtesy CANDLES Holocaust Museum At about midnight (the Terre Haute fire marshal’s estimate is 12:12 A.M.) on November 18,2003, someone threw a brick through a window of the CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazis’ Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) Holocaust Museum and Education Center at 1532 South Third Street. The perpetrator or perpetrators then splashed gasoline into the structure and struck a match. The inferno destroyed artifacts-books, letters, photographs, and posters, as well as models made by school children depicting the degradation and inhumanity of the concentration camps where, from 1942 to 1945, the Nazi regime murdered more than six million European Jews and several million other persons. Within minutes the museum was ruined. Firefighters extinguished the flames before the building-a one-story, seventy-five-by-twenty-five-foot brick structure- caved in; the place was gutted, only its trusses left standing. The small crowd that gathered to view the damage could see scrawled in black spray paint beside the door in large letters: “Remember Timmy McVeigh.”’ “‘Arsonist Reduces CANDLES Holocaust Museum to Ashes,” Terre Haute Tribune Star, Novem- ber 19, 2003. 246 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY Within twenty-four hours Terre Haute and neighboring communities rallied to support the museum’s founder, Eva Mozes Kor, a Rumanian Jewish immigrant and survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments on iden- tical-twin children at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp com- plex in Poland. Responding to an e-mail alert the next day, some 150 citizens, joined by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Mitch Daniels (who had driven the seventy miles from Lafayette), gathered in the museum’s parking lot to hold up signs labeling the fire a “hate crime,” to hear speak- ers, and, finally, to join hands in front of television cameras, forming a human chain around the burned-out structure.2Over the next few days school children began to raise money. Mary Wright, the museum’s education director, received more than seven hundred telephone calls and e- mails offering moral and financial support from locations as distant as England, South America, and Israel. A local elementary school, Dixie Bee, embarked on a fundraiser for which students engaged in “penny wars.” They were asked to bring in “5cents today, 10 cents tomorrow, 25 cents Tuesday, and $1 on Wednesday.” A teacher at Terre Haute North High School and her students took collections at the local Wal-Mart between noon and 8 P.M. on Sunday. The response was overwhelming. Meanwhile, the International Association of Arson Investigators announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonist, and the Anti-Defamation League offered an additional $2,500.3 By the end of the week, police, assisted by the FBI, had arrested an individual, whom they characterized as “a drifter,” for parole violation. The suspect had served time in prison for the arson of an Oregon Planned Parenthood clinic and had lived in Terre Haute for six months. Witnesses recalled that he had made anti-Semitic remarks. A federal grand jury in- dicted him the following month.4 But no evidence turned up linking him to the fire, and authorities were uncertain that they had found the culprit. Still, by the middle of March 2004-within just four months of the at- tack-local citizens, with assistance from outside contributors, had raised $200,000 to help rebuild the mu~eum.~ 2The author was a participant. 3“WorldwideSupport Pours in for Museum,” Terre Haute Tribune Star, November 21, 2003; “A Crime of Hate,” ibid., November 19, 2003. ‘+“FelonTorched Clinic in ’~OS,”ibid., November 25, 2003; “FBI Joins Museum Fire Investiga- tion,” ibid., November 20,2003; “GrandJury Indicts Drifter on Firearms Charge,” ibid., Decem- ber 18, 2003. 5Eva Kor, telephone conversation with author, March 12, 2004. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 247 Terre Haute in the late fall of 2003 was in many ways a typical me- dium-sized midwestern city. Located close to the site where the Wabash River becomes the border with Illinois, the city was by 1910 the most important urban area in the Indiana-Illinois coal fields and the home of significant numbers of European working-class immigrants6 In 1936, the United Mine Workers, protesting wages and working conditions (and perhaps following the local legacy of Debs), had walked out of the mines, and workers in other industries followed, initiating one of only three general strikes in American history The strike lasted two weeks but National Guardsmen, called out by the governor, patrolled the streets for six months. As the twentieth century wore on, Terre Haute prospered but did not grow. The high-sulfur, low-BTU variety of coal mined locally became less profitable in an era of internal-combustion engines.’ As a result, Terre Haute’s population declined from 70,000 in 1910 to 60,000 by the end of the century.8 With completion of Interstate 70 in 1969 and the subsequent con- struction of Honey Creek Mall three miles south of the central business district, retail businesses evacuated the downtown area. One by one, the ornate Victorian structures came down. The Terre Haute House hotel, a neo-classical, nine-story landmark made of yellow brick and limestone, closed in 1969 and soon was abandoned.

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