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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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bari
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4 out of 5
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17
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1-5 of 17

Wonderfully Organized

  • September 30, 2009
  • Rated 5 of 5 by mrsmadis0n from Greensboro, North Carolina
During my trip to DC, I wanted to make sure to visit this museum. I had heard so many wonderful things about this museum.

This museum definitely lived up to its hype. I really gained a wealth of knowledge about the Holocaust and the events that occurred during the Nazi regime.

I highly suggest stopping by this museum during your visit!

From journal History and Fun

Editor Pick

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - A Must See

  • September 8, 2009
  • Rated 5 of 5 by stvchin from Tustin, California
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - A Must See

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is on 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW. It sits directly next to the Bureau or Engraving and Printing. It sits directly diagonal SE of the Washington Monument. Admission to the Museum is free, but free tickets are required to the permanent exhibit on the Holocaust. We arrived early enough to secure tickets for later in the day.

The exterior of the building quite industrial, with walls of concrete and brick and steel beams. The obligatory security screening with the magnetometer, wanding, and bag x-raying are a given. Liquids cannot be brought into the Museum. Photography and audio/video recording are not allowed.

When we walked inside, we suddenly became aware the Museum is loosely modeled after the gas chambers of a Nazi concentration camp. The exterior concrete section resembles the guard tower and the brick exterior resembles the factory converted to gas chamber. The interior continues the industrial theme with much brick and steel, although much less intimidating. Although photography wasn’t allowed, we nicely asked a guard if we could simply snap a quick photo or two of the interior, and he let us take a few photos of the plaza inside the Museum.

We went upstairs to the Museum’s permanent exhibition on the Holocaust, which required the tickets. We proceeded to a little machine that dispensed identification cards of a little child, maybe no more than 8-10 years old. We each took a card, mine was a little boy from some village in Poland. The first part of the tour focuses on the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism during the 1930’s. There are artifacts and recreations of different things depicting the negative reality facing European Jews at that time. There are hundreds of photos of burned out Jewish-owned stores, Nazi thugs confronting and beating Jews, and other displays about the daily hardships Jews went through. There is a little computer station where you can insert your ID card to see what is happening in the life of the child at this point in time.

We proceeded downstairs for the second part of the tour, the events of World War II. The tours had more photos and displays illustrating conditions in the Jewish ghettos of Poland, being herded onto the cattle cars, and life, if you can call it that, in the concentration camps. There were displays of the living quarters, slave labor, and inhumanity that the Nazi doctors put the Jews through. There is a recreation of a cattle car used to transport Jews to the concentration camps. We boarded the car, and heard audio stories from firsthand survivors about their experiences in these camps. There is another computer station for the identification cards. I stuck mine in and it revealed that the child on my card was carted off to Treblinka. The second phase of the tour is very oppressive, and there wasn’t much for us to say about the squalid conditions the Jews were forced to live in.

We went downstairs for the third part of the tour, which has more heartening stories, with indivdual Jews taking the initiative to save other Jews at great personal risk to themselves. One such person was the King of Demnark, who hid Jews in his country. This phase of the tour also tells of the liberation of the concentration camps by the Allies, subsequent Nuremberg Trials, and the emigration of Jews to America and Israel. There is a movie, probably an hour long, called "Testimony," where the Holocaust survivors tell their personal stories. The tour ends in the Hall of Remembrance, where you can light a candle for a survivor. There is one final computer terminal to check on the status of the child on your identification card. The child on my card never made it out of Treblinka. That was very sobering, as I expected him to survive and live a long and fruitful life. The identification cards do a good job of personalizing the Holocaust, by having us experience a bit of what the child on the card went through.

A Museum employee stopped by to chat with us, he was a Holocaust survivor. The Museum has Holocaust survivors on staff to answer any questions, and to bring the whole experience at the Museum to life. He told us about the times in the camps, and what kept him going. He showed us the identification numbers the Nazis tattooed into this forearm, which serves as a powerful living reminder of the Holocaust. We didn’t have much to say, mostly because we didn’t know what would be appropriate to ask of him.

The rest of the Museum has displays on intolerance around the world, such as the genocide in Darfur, Bosnia, and Congo. There is also the exhibit called Daniel’s Story, Remember the Children, which commemorates the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust. There is also a gift shop and a snack shop in the Museum.

The Museum is a very powerful experience that evokes a bunch of different emotions, from horror to sadness, to anger that people could allow such things to happen. This is definitely not for little children. I wish we didn’t need such museums, but unfortunately in the world we live in, we do, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum does a great job of educating us and letting us learn from history.

From journal Our Nation's Capital

Editor Pick

Holocaust Museum

  • July 16, 2007
  • Rated 5 of 5 by ripplefan2 from Queens, New York
Holocaust Museum

Oh my God, what a place! Upon entering the museum, I expected what one would generally expect from a holocaust museum, general facts, gruesome pictures,and a lot of anti-Semitic propaganda from the past, but this place was completely different. Now luckily, my brother is a police officer and got all of us in ahead of everyone else with his ID, but I believe the museum is free regardless, they just have you wait on line for some minutes while they hand out passes.

After receiving our passes, we headed over to the permanent exhibition area and were told to get passport looking ID cards before entering the elevator. There were two pamphlet holders on each side of the elevator lobby filled with male and female ID cards. The IDs contained information about a real person in the Holocaust; what they did before it and, if they died, how they died or how they were rescued. A small portrait came along in my passport of a little boy from Poland who was forced to wear a golden clothed star to identify that he was Jewish and how he and his family were gasses at the Belzec camp in 1942. An extremely sad story, but what makes it worse is that it is completely true and happened to millions of people. There was a sign inside the museum, "there weren’t six million murders, there was one murder six million times."

I don’t want to give too much away about this place, but it was intense and informative. I think we spent just about two hours inside walking through the exhibit, seeing recreations of the bunks were people slept in, the ovens that were used, the train cars used, and anything else you can think of. There was one part that had tons of human hair, because the Germans would cut the hair off and sell it in 40 pound bundles for different purposes. Also, the experiments done to people to see how different things would effect the German soldiers in different scenarios was unnerving. Well, the whole place is unnerving and it's shocking that this happened in the first place. One thing that I found especially interesting was that the Allied forces knew where Auschwitz Concentration Camp was but didn’t bomb it for fear that another, worse camp would open doing more long-term damage.

One of the greatest parts of this museum was the Darfur exhibit near the exit. Acknowledging that the situation in Darfur could, and most likely will, lead to a museum being setup in the same fashion of the Holocaust Museum, this exhibit is great. It opens up our eyes to the fact that we can make a stand now instead of seeing things in perfect 20/20 hindsight.

So, if you find yourself in or around D.C., please stop by the Holocaust Museum, it is totally worth it and I swear that you won’t regret it.

From journal A Day in DC

Holocaust Museum

  • November 20, 2006
  • Rated 5 of 5 by mafnet from Lake Forest, California
A very powerful museum, the exhibits don't hold back. They show the true massacre and decimation. There are video monitors that are surrounded by concrete walls: if you are tall enough to look over them, you may be old enough to see them. Some pictures are so gory, that they cannot be seen by kids. The sights are so tragic that people are left in tears. There are models of crematoriums, an exhibit showing how many shoes were removed from the victims of the Holocaust (a room full of them), clothes, pictures, diaries, etc. If you have been to the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Museum in L.A., you will know that that one is modeled exactly like the pathways through Germany. Almost everything there is video. Here, it is photo and even more disturbing than the other. If you are faint hearted or your kids are, I advise you to think otherwise.

From journal Washington, D.C.

Editor Pick

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  • September 2, 2006
  • Rated 5 of 5 by Shady Ady from Hinckley, United Kingdom
Museums normally celebrate the achievements of humanity activity; the Holocaust Museum showcases the worse. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime. Other groups, such as Gypsies, the handicapped, Slavic people, and homosexuals were also killed. The exhibits on display are some of the most moving, tragic, and unbelievable representations of history I have witnessed. Normally for me I get restless and bored after spending 2 hours in a museum, but I happily spent more than 6 hours here.

Upon entry to the museum, you are given a mock passport of a real person, charting their history through the Holocaust, allowing you to feel emotionally connected as you walk through the exhibits. The museum uses documentary films, videos, audio-taped oral histories, and items such as a freight car, used to transport Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, and Star of David patches that Jewish prisoners were made to wear to portray the history of the Holocaust. Especially stirring is the Hall of Faces, a narrow, three-story-high space crammed with framed photographs of the 3,000 Jewish residents of a single Lithuanian town, who were murdered in September 1941, and the collection of shoes of murdered Jews, where the mixed smell of sweat and leather can still be smelt. Some of the images on show can be very disturbing, and I would not recommend it for young children.

The adjacent Hall of Remembrance provides a space for quiet reflection after your experience walking through the exhibits. In addition to the permanent exhibition, the museum also has a multimedia learning center, a resource center for students and teachers, a registry of Holocaust survivors, and occasional special exhibitions.

Amongst the museum staff are Holocaust survivors willing to talk about their experiences and answer any questions you may have. I had many questions to ask, but after my experience in the museum, I wasn’t feeling like asking questions. To me, it felt wrong and insensitive. I can imagine, though, for people, who were alive during the Holocaust, it is nice to share your experiences with someone else who went through the same things.

As with other museums in Washington, entry is free and tickets can be obtained on the day of your visit at the museum, or in advance by calling www.tickets.com (800) 400-9373. If you are collecting your tickets at the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis, it is essential to get there as early as possible, around 8am to avoid disappointment and a long wait. The museum policies are quite strict. As expected, no eating, drinking, or smoking is allowed, and all visitors pass through metal detectors upon entry. Photography, video, and audio recording is also prohibited.

The Holocaust Museum is open from 10am-5:30pm every day, apart from Yom Kippur (October 2nd) and Christmas Day. Hours are extended on Tuesdays and Thursdays from April through mid-June until 7:50pm. For more information, visit www.ushmm.org, or call the museum on (202) 488-0400.

From journal Tales of a Travelling Englishman (Part 8 - Washington D.C., USA)

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