Virginia Holocaust Museum

I just returned from Richmond and this year's Children's Literature Association annual conference. It was, as always, a combination of great and stressful. I saw some wonderful papers, met a few new people, caught up with some friends, and just generally conferenced my butt off. (BTW, if you view this on a phone the layout isn't as nice. Just FYI.)

Because I got in Wednesday night and was staying in a different area than the conference hotel, I decided to check out my neighborhood a bit. And, lo and behold, there was the Virginia Holocaust Museum just down the street. Google promised a 'Powerful museum with free entrance," and Google reviewers gave it 4.8 stars. To give some perspective on the other Holocaust museums/memorials I've written about here, the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston has 4.6 and the USHMM has 4.5. Unsurprisingly, for these more widely visited sites, it's often Holocaust deniers that are ranking things with one star. In fact, reading them today introduced me to the term 'Holohoax' which I really should have anticipated as a thing that existed yet somehow hadn't. Learn something new everyday, I guess. This could easily become a whole digression into these ratings, but we'll avoid that. What I'm getting at here is that it's well-regarded by visitors and is centrally located in Richmond. 

I came away from the experience feeling conflicted. Certainly the Museum has a good heart, and is clearly trying to do good work. People are touched by it, or responding positively, as the five-star reviews would indicate (it also ranks highly on TripAdvisor and Yelp). Many people express a preference for this museum over the USHMM and seem moved by their time there. So, why was I conflicted? Well, read on.    

The structure of the Museum seems to want you to experience the "reality" of the Holocaust. Online feedback indicates that this seems to be the takeaway many people had, with comments on Yelp like, "Very hands on museum and they do a good job of making you feel like you are there" and "“I believe this place makes you feel you are one of the Jews during the WWII.” I found the way the museum "make[s] you feel are there" to be incredibly odd. After watching a film made my Richmond's community survivors you enter the first exhibit, seen below: 

Creepy Mannequins 

I felt something, for sure, but I'm not certain it was as though I was there in the barracks with these poor guys (representing early round-ups of those who spoke against the Nazi party). There's a strange kitschyness to the whole thing that limited the amount of emotional impact. Some exhibits were more funny than troubling, such as our poor woman who has just experienced the violence of kristalnacht: 

Stuff is kinda broken, I guess?

End Game: the Allies
Save the Day

There's also something troubling me about the teleological structure of the story. There's clearly a beginning, middle, and an end. We start with these first mannequins and follow through all the way to our courtroom drama. Yet, if we think about trauma as Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son, does we need to acknowledge that trauma is disordered, full of lapses, too much or too little information, and doesn't have a tidy resolution. Literature does this well for us, but I don't think it's impossible to represent that overwhelming amount of information in architecture or museum. You can see more on this in my Year of Memorials post from a few years ago. 

Much has been written on Holocaust memorials in many more and fancier words that you'll find here. Let's look at one text that directly addresses the sort of performative "really there" aspect that the VaHM is evoking:

In a museum of the dead, the critical actors are gone, and it is up to us to perform acts of reinterpretation to meaning and memory. To some degree, then, the usual museum situation (in which we look at objects) is exploited to underscore the absence to be read in the presence of objects that stand for the violent loss of which they are only the remains.To the degree this historical, material, human loss is allowed to remain a tangible 'presence,' a Holocaust museum can constitute a particular metonymic situation: inanimate material objects document and mark the loss instead of simply substituting them through representation. In this case, the enormity of the absent referent is neither contained nor scaled down through representation that claims its presence over the terrible absence produced by genocide (122).--Vivian Patraka, Spectacular Suffering 

Yet the referent is weirdly not absent in the VaHM. Certainly we have those representations of those who were lost in pictures and letters. Yet the dominant impression is of a staged performance that one wanders through as the actors have been frozen in place. In particular I was troubled by the trajectory that led me through a train car (which whistled and made rushing noises as I walked through) to the room with a door.  The door had a small window in it, covered in mesh. It led to a recreation of a gas chamber (so, so happily mannequin free). There were no directions as to what I should do. There was a door on the other side. An exit? I refused to enter.  

The interior of the "gas chamber."

I found myself unwilling to perform the role the museum asked of me: to reenact a form of violent death. (Again, with the particular trajectory, why was I not asked to stand in front of a gun and fall "dead" into a pit?) 

Luckily, I didn't have to crawl
through here.

I went back around the whole museum as there were no optional routes around the gas chamber, again, unwilling to play dead. When I arrived at the other side of the gas chamber I found myself facing the crematoria. The whole place has the lights on timers, so if you walk through backwards (as I did) you find yourself entering dark rooms whose lights don't come on until you've wandered around a bit. I was doing this wandering in the crematoria room when the lights came on and the "ovens" began to glow. 

Now, one might say, if you're going for trauma what's wrong with being tasked to walk through a gas chamber and seeing the theatrical representation of how your body will be disposed of? I think what I truly object to is that you do just that: walk through. You move on. You live. As the family behind me did, talking about their grandfather's visit to Dachau and its emotional impact. Moving into the future. It seems a disservice to those who were never able to walk again to play dead in this particular way. 






I drifted through the rest of the museum, stopping to watch some of the Nuremberg Trials from my seat in the audience. The presence of the actual Nazi leaders on video is a strange contrast to the mannequins that surrounded them. 

You can just barely see the TV here, which was playing
actual Nuremberg scenes. 

I ended with a trip to this exhibit:

In some ways this sums up the whole thing for me. Auschwitz, now open on the second floor. Not "our Auschwitz exhibit" but just that Auschwitz itself is open, upstairs. The content is there but the context is off. At the Virginia Holocaust Museum the heart is there, and the stories of survivors who came to Richmond are important in this cradle of Patrick Henry's calls for liberty and the darker history of slave trails and confederate museums. (I shall echo a common refrain here, and one that Phil Nel touched on in his CHLA talk: why a Holocaust Museum and not a Museum of Slavery? Can't we learn the same "lessons" of "tolerance through education" when considering slavery?) To prove my point, a full list of Richmond museums here.

For my criticisms of the larger concept of "tolerance through education" you'll need to wait for my book next year. There's way more than a blog's worth. 

Tolerance Cards!

I also just discovered you can get married there. Who? What? Why? I cannot imagine sending out wedding invites asking everyone to come celebrate with me at the Holocaust Museum. Anyway, people do. You can find pictures here.