by J. Nathan Matias
The Poetry of Shoes
They were just old shoes, a grey pile of moldy shoes I would have thrown away myself, had I found them in the back corner of a closet. But here, in this testament of human cruelty, the shoes of the dead cried out.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the Hellfire
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., tells a story that causes many to weep. The mass genocide of millions of people is a terrible tale. One does not enter this museum lightly.
Before entering the permanent exhibit, visitors are given an ID card and directed to an elevator. The elevator doors shut. On the way up, the television screens glow brightly. Visitors relive for the first time the American Soldiers' first encounters with the death camps. This storytelling museum begins by framing the story en medius res.
"You can't imagine," the view-screen says. Yet that is exactly what this museum is designed to do: pass memory, sorrow, and disgust to those who were never there. The doors open. You can't miss it. Wall-size photographs are mounted on the opposing wall. They show charred bodies and the Americans who found them. Another view-screen plays color footage from the death camps.
Then the exhibit begins.
Like all good storytellers, this museum tells more than a set of facts; it weaves an experience from fact, opinion, artifacts, analysis, and primary sources. This experience has been very finely assembled with great scholarly care, crafted detail, and artistic skill.
The first section of the museum, behind a pane of glass, reads "Before the Holocaust." After all, back-story is important, especially since complex factors lead to the rise of Nazi Germany and the Anti-Semitism that flowered under Nazi power.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum's permanent exhibit is long, so the museum's creators have used several techniques regularly to give the exhibit a strong narrative. This exhibit uses a range of presentation media grouped into self-contained units. These combine to tell a single story through high quality internal arrangement and an immersive, emotional atmosphere. But most of all, the story is told through a well-designed path that guides visitors when necessary and nudges them to explore when suitable.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum doesn't just teach. It doesn't just encourage you to respond; it demands a response, demands that at the end we be silent, sit down, reflect, and make our own sense out of this madness.
Most of this analysis of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is based on direct observation. Too late in my research, I found out that David Mandel, the exhibit's designer, has created an hour-long film about the narrative technique of the museum. But only one copy of "Telling the story of the Holocaust, a narrative historical museum" by David Mandel seems to exist. It's at Clemson University. You can find it on WorldCat, accession No: OCLC: 48260553.
Don't Interlibrary Loan it all at once.
- Photographs of the museum's displays are available on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.