US Holocaust Memorial Museum

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Photo by flickr user Son of Groucho

People remember the holocaust in many private ways, but this memorial museum is where the whole country remembers and comes to term with what happened – and commits itself to preventing anything similar happening in the future. It does this by not just being a memorial, but also being a museum, presenting artefacts and testimonials from survivors as proof of what today seems like an almost impossible event.

The museum's collection includes more than 12,750 artefacts, 49 million pages of archival documents, 80,000 historical photographs, a register of 200,000 survivors, 1,000 hours of archival footage, and 9,000 oral history testimonies. Even the building itself is designed to be emotive: by architect and holocaust survivor, James Ingo Freed, it's a disquieting place, solem and stark compared to the Georgian buildings that surround it.

The permanent exhibit is in three main sections: on the first floor the museum looks at the Nazi invasion of Poland, on the second the holocaust and on the third, the end of the war and liberation from the camps. The museum's content is graphic – the recommend children stick to the children's section of the museum – but then this is the truth that's being presented, and the truth is incredibly disquieting.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

Written by  Andrew Armour.

Comments, reviews and questions by other travellers

There are no posts. Why not be the first to have your say?