The Duty of the Holocaust Museum

Every April, on Holocaust memorial day, a loud siren cuts through the air of every city, town and village in Israel. For two loaded minutes, the nation stands silently still and remembers the six million innocents slaughtered by the Germans. 

Children stop playing and drivers on busy motorways stand next to their vehicles - every living soul stands in deadly silence and contemplation. 

This is Israel’s way of keeping the memory of Hitler’s six million Jewish victims alive. But in reality, Israelis do not need a reminder - the Holocaust is etched deep in every Jewish person’s consciousness. Besides being a part of many families’ personal history, the Shoah helped bring the Jewish state into being and sealed the argument over the need for a permanent home for the persecuted people. 

So pivotal is the Holocaust to the Jewish people’s narrative that in 1961, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stood at the Knesset to announce that Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mastermind of the Final Solution has been captured by Israeli secret agents in Argentina. 

Eichmann’s trial gripped the then-13-year-old state. People were glued to their radio, including young schoolboy Benjamin Netanyahu who clearly remembers the spine-chilling testimonies being the only topic of conversation at school, the street and people’s homes.  

“When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel,” said Eichmann’s legendary prosecutor Gidon Hausner, “I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers, but they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger at him who sits in the dock, and cry ‘I accuse’, for their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland, their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe - their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard, therefore I will be their spokesman.”

Holocaust museums are meant to be the victims’ voice. They are trusted to tell the world how six million innocents were targeted and murdered for being Jewish - how they were forced to wear a yellow star, were loaded onto cattle cars without food or drink for days-long journeys, and how at the concentration camps the men, women and children were frozen, starved and gassed to death.

It is their duty to tell the world of the Holocaust as history’s worst antisemitic crime - the only time in history where the systematic extermination of an entire people was meticulously planned and efficiently executed. “I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death,” said Eichmann, “gear meshed with gear, like clockwork, it was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times.”

Every Jewish person alive, be they from Poland or Morroco, Iraq or Philadelphia, sees the Shoah as sacred - an unparalleled event in world and Jewish history that is beyond comparison. Even decades on, the victims’ suffering remains unfathomable, and the Germans’ evil is still beyond comprehension.

Imagine Jewish people’s outrage at a Holocaust centre hosting a George Floyd exhibit. Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida has recently put on the exhibition titled Uprooting Prejudice: Faces of Change, featuring photographs of people reacting to Floyd’s death. 

The show was covered in the Jewish press from LA to Tel Aviv and the centre was bombarded with angry messages. The implied comparison between Floyd’s fate and the Holocaust was an unbearable insult to the dead, and the idea of anyone, let alone Jews, pairing the two was impossible to digest.

The centre’s assistant director published a post explaining her reasoning but her words only infuriated readers. Lisa Bachman argued that the centre stimulates thinking about “the nature of prejudice, bigotry, antisemitism, hate, and extremist ideologies that marginalises people and leads to violence”. She also clarified that “this is not a comparison of pain but a recognition of the pain that still, sadly, exists in our society.”

Her words served as a harrowing wake-up-call to many who realised that even the memory of the six million slaughtered, is subject to woke culture takeover. One reader referred to The Florida Holocaust Remembrance Center, as "a mirror of Jewish American liberalism - does not hesitate to hate its people and their history”. Another wrote: “your disgusting comparison of the junkie criminal Floyd to the 6 million innocent, tortured, slaughtered Jews is an unforgivable act of absolute evil, this shows with complete clarity how you, and people like you, are more concerned with whoring yourselves out for your ‘woke’, ‘progressive’ virtue-signalling causes, which in fact, are just militant, totalitarian exercises to force the vast majority of us into appeasement, cowardice and submission.."

These readers are right. 

Holocaust museums have grown increasingly progressive, showing classic social-activist, woke symptoms. Focusing on racism, bigotry, equality, discrimination and of course identity, they aim to ‘fix’ the world and prevent future societal ills. They increasingly blur word meanings and adapt terminology to suit a globalist agenda - this is how they come to present the systematic extermination of six million Jews not as an antisemitic genocide, but as part of a global genocide phenomenon.

Bachman’s suggestion that activism similar to that of the Florida centre would have been effective under Hitler shows ignorance and alarming naivety. “Imagine being a Jewish person in the early 1930s when they were initially taken away from their homes,” writes Bachman, “then, wonder what would have happened if someone would have stood up and protested? What would have happened if someone created an art exhibit with messages suggesting we unite? What would have happened if more people were disgusted by the propaganda that led to the belief that Jews were inferior?”

Does Bachman really suggest Jews and conscientious objectors should have fought the Nazis with art exhibits? People living under Nazi rule did not enjoy the freedom to expresses nonconformist opinions. They certainly could not put on exhibitions that expressed opinions offensive to the Nazi doctrine. The Nazis were brutally intolerant of criticism and nonconformity - supporting a Jewish person meant death and ‘political prisoners’ were sent to concentration camps. 

Holocaust museums state their mission as learning from the past to make a better future. Drawing lessons from the past is indeed the wish of many survivors, but why do museums turn to present day for examples of injustice, when each and every human rights abuse known to man has manifested itself in the Holocaust? 

Jews were stripped of their citizenship as well as their right to education, employment and free movement. They were banned from shops and services, forcibly torn from their homes and shifted to concentration camps where they were inflicted with punishing forced labour. Men worked in freezing conditions wearing just a single layer of clothing with no underwear or socks - anyone caught trying to use an empty sack or a dead inmate’s shirt as an extra layer was killed. The Jews were separated from their children, tortured, gassed and starved to death - how is this not enough ‘material’ to teach about discrimination and bigotry? 

What a powerful lesson young people can learn from asking themselves what identity or human rights a ‘musselmann’ had - this was the death camp slang term for the emaciated ‘breathing skeletons’ of Auschwitz. When rescued by the allied forces these men weighed 30 kg. This lesson’s impact can be immeasurably increased with a photo or video of these individuals years later, like Dr Aharon Beilin and writer Yechiel Dinur who then testified at the Eichmann trial. 

These stories are forever relevant and valid - only last week, researchers digging near Sobibor found Identity tags worn by four children deported to the Polish death camp. The team sent details of the tags to YadVashem and immediately received identification and photos of the little Dutch children. 

Some of the children reached Sobibor on a children’s transport – 1300 little children aged 4–8, who were sent there to die, without their parents - Lea Judith De La Penha died age 6, Deddie Zak died age 8. Annie Kapper, 12 and David Juda Van der Velde aged 11 were taken straight to the gas chambers. 

How about, instead of a lesson where students write poems concerning their identity, they can use their imagination to place themselves on that train as 6, 8 or 12-year-olds, separated from their parents, without a comforting voice, food or drink, on a long journey to the unknown. 

With surveys pointing to millennials having little to no knowledge of the Holocaust, many not knowing what Auschwitz is, it is time for museums to concentrate efforts on telling the specific stories of the Holocaust victims. 

Instead of promoting social-activism mantras, they should attack modern-day antisemitism. With 9 out of 10 US Jews considering antisemitism a problem, it is time to actively dispel the ugly, vile myths surrounding Jews and the Jewish state. Tear to pieces every antisemitic attack emanating from politicians and recognised bodies. From a caricature depicting Rothschild as a pig to the story of Israel depriving Palestinians of COVID vaccines - a story championed by the likes of Rashida Tlaib and MP Nadia Whittome. 

“The gangrene of anti-Semitism continues to spread in the 21st century,” wrote Netanyahu recently, “we see expressions of it at respected universities in North America, in Islamic madrasas in south Asia, and among the European elite” - Holocaust museums must fight the spread of antisemitism with all their might.  They must recognise that antisemitism is not just another form of racism - it is a lie that has been taking root over many centuries, the essence of which is that jews pose a threat to the rest of the world - an evil lie that culminated in Hitler’s bid to eliminate them off the face of the earth. 

I call on museums to never compare the Holocaust to any present-day miscarriage of justice. The scale, cruelty and suffering of Auschwitz are so unlike any other that Eichmann Trial witness Katsetnick called it ‘Planet Auschwitz’, where time “was not like it is here on earth … the inhabitants of this planet had no names, they had no parents nor did they have children … they did not dress in the way we dress here, they were not born there and they did not give birth; they breathed according to different laws of nature; they did not live – nor did they die – according to the laws of this world...”

Reminding people of this ‘planet’ is the museums’ duty.

I remind Holocaust museums that the victims’ only stated revenge was informing the world of the Germans’ evil. I urge them to use every education program, event and exhibition to tell the world these specific innocents’ stories and names - where they went to school, where they worked, what hobbies they had, what books they read, who were their brothers and sisters?

Hannah is a London based journalist covering culture and current affairs. She writes about photography, film and TV for outlets in the UK and US, and covers current affairs with particular interest in the Jewish world. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Her films were screened in festivals worldwide and parts of her documentary about Holocaust survivor Leon Greenman were screened on the BBC.

You can find more from Hannah here.