In a large room in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, two television screens relay testimonies from Holocaust survivors.
“History hasn’t learned anything,” says Lili Pohlmann, who was born in Lwow, Poland, in 1930. During the second world war she went into hiding and lost her father and little brother. “We always say never again, but it happens all the time. Not for nothing does one say that history repeats itself.”
Around these screens, display boards showcase the shortlisted architectural designs for the UK Holocaust Memorial to honour victims and survivors. An international competition was launched by the government in 2016 and the winning firm will be announced just after Museums Journal goes to press. The designs for the memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens next to the Palace of Westminster range from those easily linked to Jewish symbolism – British architect John McAslan proposes a pile of six million stones to commemorate each victim – to the more abstract design by Polish-American Daniel Libeskind of a metallic ramp cutting into the ground.
The Holocaust, which came to an end more than 70 years ago, remains a difficult subject for the public and museum professionals alike. The challenge that faces institutions is more pressing than ever, particularly as there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors still alive.
Alongside plans for the London memorial, some of the world’s key displays of Holocaust material are being updated, from Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) permanent exhibition in London to the material at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland. Those involved in these projects point to the complexity of telling these stories as well as the different perspectives and potential political pitfalls when approaching the subject, including who gets to write Holocaust history and why.
A 2015 report by the Holocaust Commission, which produced recommendations for the UK memorial, said there were significant examples of schools not prioritising the Holocaust, with teachers confused about how to teach it. Peter Bazalgette, the jury chair for the Westminster memorial, said it was vital that the project included a learning centre.
“Although the digital era brings us many benefits, it also has some disadvantages,” Bazalgette says. “It appears Holocaust denial will grow over the next 10 years, because people who were not Holocaust deniers in the past can now find each other online and support each other’s prejudices.” And that, he says, means there’s an even greater need to educate future generations.
The memorial project will be supplemented by a strong digital offer: the television broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky has recorded 112 interviews with British survivors, which will be available online.
The IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, which opened in 2000, is being overhauled for a relaunch in 2021. The new galleries will draw from the previous two decades of Holocaust research, according to James Bulgin, the content leader for the galleries. Changes will include a lighter space and greater focus on victims’ stories.
“There’s an issue in contemporary society that the Holocaust has become a totemic moral absolute,” Bulgin says. “There’s a sense that the Holocaust has become this symbol, which has meant people have stopped engaging with the historical detail.”
The IWM has urged the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation to reconsider its proposals for a learning centre, which has the potential to replicate its own plans for a digital learning and events space. The foundation’s proposed site for the centre is less than a mile away from IWM London, which will “di vide the public offer on learning about the Holocaust”, according to the IWM.
Individuals, not victims
One of the issues that Bulgin has had to deal with is the fact that a narrative defined by the actions of the Nazis may cement the status of those who suffered as victims, rather than individuals. And while it might be more straightforward to tell a story framed by Nazi crimes, this prioritises the perpetrators over those who suffered.
“The first time visitors meet anyone in this history they meet them as people, not implicitly as victims,” says Bulgin. “That’s something museums haven’t done globally.”
Dispatching myths and stereotypes is a priority for the IWM. Those myths include that the Holocaust wasn’t known about in Britain, but actually the foreign secretary Anthony Eden informed the House of Commons in 1942 of the mass execution of Jews; and that events happened in unseen places, but the death squads often executed people publicly in daylight. Bulgin thinks we need to widen the focus beyond pictures of victims in striped uniforms as he says millions would never have seen such a uniform.
“When you look at what happened on the ground, it’s bloody and incredibly violent,” says Bulgin. “This was not the hyper-organised euthanasia that popular myth suggests.
“The corollary to that is that it didn’t happen in spite of civilisation, it happened because of civilisation,” he adds. “And the idea that reasoned thinking doesn’t always lead to enlightened decision-making is a startling one.”
Bulgin says that those involved in the Holocaust knew exactly what they were doing. “It reveals a latent ability of educated human beings of being capable of things like this,” he says.
Those organising the new displays at Auschwitz-Birkenau are taking a different approach, moving towards a greater emphasis on the perpetrators. But they will also focus on the people whose lives were destroyed, display individuals’ possessions and combine large numbers of artefacts to give a sense of scale.
Pawel Sawicki, the museum’s spokesman, says sections of the current exhibition deal with extermination and parts of camp life, including work and children. “We need to show the world of the perpetrators,” he says of the additions, pointing out that the exhibition was created in 1955. “That was 10 years after the war and there was a focus on commemoration – it was too early. But if we consider Auschwitz as a warning of the future, we need to understand the SS men who operated it, how it began as one camp and ended as three. We need to explain how it was built.”
The new exhibition will open in phases over the next nine years. It will continue to operate with tour guides who will tailor information towards particular groups. Sawicki says the current nationalist Polish government does not interfere in the site’s operation.
One of the most well-known historical examples of curating such difficult work is exemplified by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 1993. In Edward Linenthal’s 1995 book, Preserving Memory: The Struggles to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, the American academic describes disagreements about whether to institutionalise Holocaust memory at all and the degree to which it should cover different groups’ tragedies. According to the book, in 1981, Aloysius Mazewski, the president of the Polish American Congress, was critical of plans for the museum. They were, he said at the time, “highly prejudicial” in overlooking the three million Poles and four million other Christians who were killed.
Difficult story to tell
“You are entering such a nest of politics, it all comes around with a whole lot of people insisting different things are the most important,” says Martin Smith, a British documentary maker who was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first permanent exhibition director. “And anyone trying to tell it in a clumsy way is heading for trouble. Yet it needs to be done.”
Smith says he was employed because of his ability to explain complicated stories to a mass audience and that it was often challenging to marry the concerns of survivors’ families with his instincts as a storyteller.
“It’s what documentary storytellers do,” he adds. “It’s a question you ask all the time: ‘To what extent is something an important fact?’ And whether those facts connect to you in a way that makes you think and feel empathy. You go for the artefact or the picture that highlights the emotion you want to convey as efficiently as possible.”
Recently, museums have had the benefit of more research into the field, but have to also deal with contemporary challenges, perhaps those previously unimaginable to Holocaust survivors shortly after the war.
“It is a field that is constantly evolving, with more new evidence,” says Abigail Morris, the chief executive of the Jewish Museum, London. “The Holocaust ought to be represented by offering a glimpse of life before it, showing a vibrant, colourful and complex community, the differences of the Jewish pre-war community, the assimilation and subsequent anti-semitism, and what was lost, including all the possible lives that could have been lived.”
Morris adds that no discussion of events should end with that time and that it should also focus on liberation and the rebuilding of lives, thereby moving the Holocaust further than 1945. Sadly, the museum has had to factor in a recent rise in anti-semitic hate crime and has to contend with ignorance among school groups.
“We regularly have children tell us that they believed Jews to be ‘extinct’ as they thought the community had been annihilated in the Holocaust,” Morris says.
Future engagement
To tackle such problems, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire has received funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, which is administered by the Museums Association, for an exhibition titled The Journey, which follows a young German Jewish boy travelling to the UK on the Kindertransport.
“A highlight is the personal contribution of a Holocaust survivor,” says the museum’s director of learning, James Griffiths. “This will soon be impossible, so the project brings survivors and different audience groups together to plan how future audiences can engage most effectively with the collections, both in the physical exhibition and the planned virtual experience.”
With regard to the rest of the centre’s collections, exhibitions and survivor testimonies, Griffiths says: “All experiences deserve to be showcased; we don’t exclude stories, we rotate them. We are an actively collecting museum and we are collecting oral history and objects while we can.”
Other new projects include the Lake District Holocaust Project, which has an exhibition at Windermere Library in Cumbria and tells the story of the Windermere Boys, around 300 Holocaust survivors associated with the area. The project’s director, Trevor Avery, says his challenge is to showcase the stories of the survivors’ children and grandchildren.
“How do you construct a living memorial? Their history shouldn’t be a history lesson, the whole thing must keep evolving,” says Avery. “You have to constantly try to heal the wound, though I fear it’s forever open. We have to accommodate that.”
The answer to how one might memorialise the Holocaust is as complicated as the millions of stories it comprises. As a result, any exhibition will attract supporters and detractors. But trying to tell this history, even if museums meet difficulties along the way, is surely better than not telling it at all.
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist
“History hasn’t learned anything,” says Lili Pohlmann, who was born in Lwow, Poland, in 1930. During the second world war she went into hiding and lost her father and little brother. “We always say never again, but it happens all the time. Not for nothing does one say that history repeats itself.”
Around these screens, display boards showcase the shortlisted architectural designs for the UK Holocaust Memorial to honour victims and survivors. An international competition was launched by the government in 2016 and the winning firm will be announced just after Museums Journal goes to press. The designs for the memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens next to the Palace of Westminster range from those easily linked to Jewish symbolism – British architect John McAslan proposes a pile of six million stones to commemorate each victim – to the more abstract design by Polish-American Daniel Libeskind of a metallic ramp cutting into the ground.
The Holocaust, which came to an end more than 70 years ago, remains a difficult subject for the public and museum professionals alike. The challenge that faces institutions is more pressing than ever, particularly as there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors still alive.
Alongside plans for the London memorial, some of the world’s key displays of Holocaust material are being updated, from Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) permanent exhibition in London to the material at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland. Those involved in these projects point to the complexity of telling these stories as well as the different perspectives and potential political pitfalls when approaching the subject, including who gets to write Holocaust history and why.
A 2015 report by the Holocaust Commission, which produced recommendations for the UK memorial, said there were significant examples of schools not prioritising the Holocaust, with teachers confused about how to teach it. Peter Bazalgette, the jury chair for the Westminster memorial, said it was vital that the project included a learning centre.
“Although the digital era brings us many benefits, it also has some disadvantages,” Bazalgette says. “It appears Holocaust denial will grow over the next 10 years, because people who were not Holocaust deniers in the past can now find each other online and support each other’s prejudices.” And that, he says, means there’s an even greater need to educate future generations.
The memorial project will be supplemented by a strong digital offer: the television broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky has recorded 112 interviews with British survivors, which will be available online.
The IWM’s Holocaust Exhibition, which opened in 2000, is being overhauled for a relaunch in 2021. The new galleries will draw from the previous two decades of Holocaust research, according to James Bulgin, the content leader for the galleries. Changes will include a lighter space and greater focus on victims’ stories.
“There’s an issue in contemporary society that the Holocaust has become a totemic moral absolute,” Bulgin says. “There’s a sense that the Holocaust has become this symbol, which has meant people have stopped engaging with the historical detail.”
The IWM has urged the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation to reconsider its proposals for a learning centre, which has the potential to replicate its own plans for a digital learning and events space. The foundation’s proposed site for the centre is less than a mile away from IWM London, which will “di vide the public offer on learning about the Holocaust”, according to the IWM.
Individuals, not victims
One of the issues that Bulgin has had to deal with is the fact that a narrative defined by the actions of the Nazis may cement the status of those who suffered as victims, rather than individuals. And while it might be more straightforward to tell a story framed by Nazi crimes, this prioritises the perpetrators over those who suffered.
“The first time visitors meet anyone in this history they meet them as people, not implicitly as victims,” says Bulgin. “That’s something museums haven’t done globally.”
Dispatching myths and stereotypes is a priority for the IWM. Those myths include that the Holocaust wasn’t known about in Britain, but actually the foreign secretary Anthony Eden informed the House of Commons in 1942 of the mass execution of Jews; and that events happened in unseen places, but the death squads often executed people publicly in daylight. Bulgin thinks we need to widen the focus beyond pictures of victims in striped uniforms as he says millions would never have seen such a uniform.
“When you look at what happened on the ground, it’s bloody and incredibly violent,” says Bulgin. “This was not the hyper-organised euthanasia that popular myth suggests.
“The corollary to that is that it didn’t happen in spite of civilisation, it happened because of civilisation,” he adds. “And the idea that reasoned thinking doesn’t always lead to enlightened decision-making is a startling one.”
Bulgin says that those involved in the Holocaust knew exactly what they were doing. “It reveals a latent ability of educated human beings of being capable of things like this,” he says.
Those organising the new displays at Auschwitz-Birkenau are taking a different approach, moving towards a greater emphasis on the perpetrators. But they will also focus on the people whose lives were destroyed, display individuals’ possessions and combine large numbers of artefacts to give a sense of scale.
Pawel Sawicki, the museum’s spokesman, says sections of the current exhibition deal with extermination and parts of camp life, including work and children. “We need to show the world of the perpetrators,” he says of the additions, pointing out that the exhibition was created in 1955. “That was 10 years after the war and there was a focus on commemoration – it was too early. But if we consider Auschwitz as a warning of the future, we need to understand the SS men who operated it, how it began as one camp and ended as three. We need to explain how it was built.”
The new exhibition will open in phases over the next nine years. It will continue to operate with tour guides who will tailor information towards particular groups. Sawicki says the current nationalist Polish government does not interfere in the site’s operation.
One of the most well-known historical examples of curating such difficult work is exemplified by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 1993. In Edward Linenthal’s 1995 book, Preserving Memory: The Struggles to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, the American academic describes disagreements about whether to institutionalise Holocaust memory at all and the degree to which it should cover different groups’ tragedies. According to the book, in 1981, Aloysius Mazewski, the president of the Polish American Congress, was critical of plans for the museum. They were, he said at the time, “highly prejudicial” in overlooking the three million Poles and four million other Christians who were killed.
Difficult story to tell
“You are entering such a nest of politics, it all comes around with a whole lot of people insisting different things are the most important,” says Martin Smith, a British documentary maker who was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first permanent exhibition director. “And anyone trying to tell it in a clumsy way is heading for trouble. Yet it needs to be done.”
Smith says he was employed because of his ability to explain complicated stories to a mass audience and that it was often challenging to marry the concerns of survivors’ families with his instincts as a storyteller.
“It’s what documentary storytellers do,” he adds. “It’s a question you ask all the time: ‘To what extent is something an important fact?’ And whether those facts connect to you in a way that makes you think and feel empathy. You go for the artefact or the picture that highlights the emotion you want to convey as efficiently as possible.”
Recently, museums have had the benefit of more research into the field, but have to also deal with contemporary challenges, perhaps those previously unimaginable to Holocaust survivors shortly after the war.
“It is a field that is constantly evolving, with more new evidence,” says Abigail Morris, the chief executive of the Jewish Museum, London. “The Holocaust ought to be represented by offering a glimpse of life before it, showing a vibrant, colourful and complex community, the differences of the Jewish pre-war community, the assimilation and subsequent anti-semitism, and what was lost, including all the possible lives that could have been lived.”
Morris adds that no discussion of events should end with that time and that it should also focus on liberation and the rebuilding of lives, thereby moving the Holocaust further than 1945. Sadly, the museum has had to factor in a recent rise in anti-semitic hate crime and has to contend with ignorance among school groups.
“We regularly have children tell us that they believed Jews to be ‘extinct’ as they thought the community had been annihilated in the Holocaust,” Morris says.
Future engagement
To tackle such problems, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottinghamshire has received funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, which is administered by the Museums Association, for an exhibition titled The Journey, which follows a young German Jewish boy travelling to the UK on the Kindertransport.
“A highlight is the personal contribution of a Holocaust survivor,” says the museum’s director of learning, James Griffiths. “This will soon be impossible, so the project brings survivors and different audience groups together to plan how future audiences can engage most effectively with the collections, both in the physical exhibition and the planned virtual experience.”
With regard to the rest of the centre’s collections, exhibitions and survivor testimonies, Griffiths says: “All experiences deserve to be showcased; we don’t exclude stories, we rotate them. We are an actively collecting museum and we are collecting oral history and objects while we can.”
Other new projects include the Lake District Holocaust Project, which has an exhibition at Windermere Library in Cumbria and tells the story of the Windermere Boys, around 300 Holocaust survivors associated with the area. The project’s director, Trevor Avery, says his challenge is to showcase the stories of the survivors’ children and grandchildren.
“How do you construct a living memorial? Their history shouldn’t be a history lesson, the whole thing must keep evolving,” says Avery. “You have to constantly try to heal the wound, though I fear it’s forever open. We have to accommodate that.”
The answer to how one might memorialise the Holocaust is as complicated as the millions of stories it comprises. As a result, any exhibition will attract supporters and detractors. But trying to tell this history, even if museums meet difficulties along the way, is surely better than not telling it at all.
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist