Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Remembering, Representing, Reframing presented by ENGL 7239: Portraying Depth of Destruction

One of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s most well-known use of objects is a used pile of shoes from the Majdanek Concentration Camp located near the end of the permanent collection. Displaying victims' possessions in Holocaust museums is one technique that attempts to communicate the magnitude of loss (Oztig 64).The shoes on display at the museum “were chosen specifically to provide museum visitors the opportunity to identify with those who were destroyed” and “are meant to stand in for those events, serve as sign for what happened, and to invoke in museum goers’ imaginations the enormity of the destruction” (Bernard-Donals 418). Initially appearing as a mass of dirty leather, a closer look reveals individual shoes mixed into the pile–none of which are in pairs. These unmatched, uncleaned shoes are compiled haphazardly in the same way for which they were stored by Nazis. By using a highly relatable and deeply personal object, like a shoe, the conceptually difficult number of six million murdered is given corporeality.

Inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, “The Room of Names” is a dimly lit, otherwise empty room filled with screens that recite the name, birth year, and death year of individual Jewish victims of the Holocaust. A study of emotionally oriented museum design indicates that empty spaces “invoke deep reflection” while the use of audio increases emotional engagement with audiences (Zhihui Zhang 8). Some benches are available so that visitors can listen to the recitation of names as long as they would like within museum hours. Hearing the full list would take six years, seven months, and twenty-seven days, highlighting the impossibility of fully grasping this loss. The knowledge of the impossibility of hearing every name acts symbolically for the comprehensive extermination acted out by the Nazis. 

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the photography exhibit One Thousand Seventy-eight Blue Skies compiles individual images of the skies above every known Nazi concentration camp and killing center in Europe. The artist, Anton Kusters', intention is to invite reflection on the systemic and expansive nature of the camps. It can be easy for visitors to assume that extermination was restricted to a few camps or countries, but this is untrue. The symbolism of the photographs attempts to represent that expansiveness with images of open sky. Each image of the sky represents a view shared by thousands of individuals who went through the camps. The images of skies themselves are clear and serene, juxtaposing the horrors that took place beneath them. In this way, the display attempts to represent the immense scale of Nazi atrocities.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’s most prominent and well known feature is the Field of Stelae located outside of the memorial’s information center. Visitors walk through a field of 2,711 unmarked concrete pillars that start low to the ground at the perimeters of the field. As they proceed inward, the stelae grow taller, symbolically placing visitors “underground” with the Jewish victims. The acres of rectangular slabs represent both the unmarked graves of the concentration camps and the coffins that those victims never had the dignity to be buried in. As visitors move into the heart of the memorial, the height of the stelae casts deep shadows and the many converging paths create a sense of confusion and anxiety. This transformation turns the loss of lives from a concept into a visceral, emotional experience.