It’s been a while since I last wrote on this blog, so here’s a little something that I wrote after my trip to Israel this summer. I visited the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem and offered to write a museum analysis for the trip organizers based off my observations. The museum itself is a masterpiece of design, from the architecture of the building to the smallest display cabinets. An appropriately somber atmosphere permeates every corner of the place. Aside from its emotional power, however, Yad Vashem also operates perfectly well as an educational center about the Holocaust, with a plethora of objects and informative panels on display and a massive testimonial repository. What follows is my rough assessment of Yad Vashem’s narrative design, exhibition layout, and educational potential. It is important to note that the following recollections were collected from my first (and so far only) visit to the museum. Photography is not allowed inside, so I took extensive notes of my observations in a notebook. Despite the thoroughness of my recordings, I obviously missed a lot of details. Yad Vashem is massive, and even ten visits wouldn’t offer enough time to take in everything. I only had a couple hours to experience the museum, but I’m sure a slower and more methodical visit would yield a more detailed analysis. The museum itself is also the only aspect of Yad Vashem that I write about here. Other parts of the campus (like the incredible children’s memorial) are not included.
Storytelling and Narrative
Yad Vashem operates under four mandates: to educate the public, amass archival documents, honor the righteous among nations, and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The fourth mandate heavily shapes the narrative focus of its museum. The Yad Vashem museum recounts a wide-scale history of the Holocaust but does so by telling the victims’ stories in a way that both informs visitors and honors the dead. Far too often the scale of death during the Final Solution can overwhelm modern audiences with the sheer numbers of those killed and cause us to view those events with a slight sense of personal detachment. While Yad Vashem occasionally confronts visitors with these statistics in a few of its exhibits, the museum’s primary narrative focus routinely highlights the individual lives lost during Hitler’s reign.
The museum maintains a bottom-up perspective on the history of the Holocaust. While large-scale events like the Nazification of Germany, the implementation of the Final Solution, and the launching of World War II frame the overarching narrative, visitors learn about these episodes through the lens of the people who experienced them firsthand, primarily Europe’s Jews. The typical museum tour begins with small exhibits on daily life in the years before the Holocaust, then goes on to explore the topics of European anti-Semitism, ghetto life, forced deportations, concentration camps, and mass murder from a predominately Jewish perspective. Nearly every exhibition room contains multiple biographical panels which spotlight individual Jews whose life stories intertwined with the respective subject matter on display. When entering a new exhibition space, guides often introduce the next subject by skillfully telling a personal anecdote regarding a featured historical figure, such using the story of Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow to segue into an exhibit on the Treblinka death camp.
Curators prioritize the individual histories behind the artifacts on display, using material culture as an effective medium for telling the stories of people who left few (if any) other surviving records or documentation. For example, the exhibit on the division of Poland tells its narrative from a ground-level vantage point, using diaries, family photographs, and everyday objects to emphasize the terror felt by Jewish Poles during the event. While the original owners of most of these personal artifacts did not survive the war, part of them lives on in through the curators’ detailed item descriptions. For instance, a ruined guitar tells the heartbreaking story of the Polish Matsa family, who crafted such instruments for their living. This storytelling decision not only keeps one’s focus on the individuals who suffered under Nazi atrocities, but also builds a powerful emotional backbone to each exhibit.
While this individualistic lens forms the core of Yad Vashem’s narrative focus, other important themes recur throughout each exhibit and aid visitors in understanding how an event as catastrophic as the Holocaust emerged. Topics on the willingness of the Nazi regime to lie to its people and its efficiency at deception also pervade many exhibits, notably those on Nazi propaganda. Issues of how international indifference and disbelief contributed to the Holocaust’s destructive legacy resonate throughout the museum and are topics of increasing relevance in today’s growing climate of Holocaust denial. As if to leave no ambiguity regarding the extent of blame for Nazi atrocities, my guide subtly (but consistently) used the term “murder” instead of more motivationally-vague verbs like “kill” or “die” to describe Jewish deaths.
The Yad Vashem museum is largely oriented towards an adult audience and its narrative choices reflect that assumption of maturity. The sheer brutality of the Holocaust is presented with few filters (the end film on the closure of the concentration camps and subsequent mass burials is particularly visceral and disturbing), and the injustice wrought upon its victims underscores each exhibit. By emphasizing personal connections and shared humanity between modern visitors and the victims of the Holocaust, however, the museum invests its patrons in the history of this great tragedy. As a result, a standard visit can be a very powerful experience, producing deep anguish, sympathy, and anger among visitors. The Yad Vashem museum tells the sad history of the Holocaust in a very effective and personally-engaging manner, and its final exhibit, the beautifully-designed Hall of Names, reminds guests of the importance of memory and why we must never forget what happened decades ago. The narrative concludes with a picturesque view of Jerusalem, a bittersweet note of hope that contrasts with the bleakness of everything that precedes it.
Exhibition Design
The masterful exhibit design of Yad Vashem enables curators to tell their narratives in a variety of imaginative and immersive ways. The building itself, designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie in 2005, uses its very architecture to augment the storytelling power of the exhibits within. The facility is a massive cement prism that exists mostly underground as a metaphor for European Jewry during the Holocaust. Museum designers also used the interior space to great effect in creating an intentionally austere and uncomfortable atmosphere. The inside of the museum consists of a long central hall whose tall and imposing cement walls lack any decorum whatsoever. A single window shines at the far end of the stark corridor, but the rest of the main chamber remains slightly dim. While the distant light beckons visitors with a vague feeling of hope, the barren cement aesthetic ensures a somber, somewhat tomb-like ambience within the chamber itself.
Exhibits occupy smaller adjacent corridors that snake back and forth across the central hall. The museum restricts visitor traffic to a linear route from beginning to end, though movement within the individual exhibits themselves is somewhat looser, allowing guests to explore at their leisure. In contrast to the sparsely decorated main chamber, the walls of Yad Vashem’s exhibit spaces bustle with artifacts and photographs. Some rooms overwhelm the visitor with massive quantities of objects and sounds. An early exhibit on the rise of Nazism drapes its walls in red Nazi flags and propagandist paraphernalia while speakers and monitors blare recordings of Hitler. While these rooms are certainly busy, they rarely seem cluttered, and each object on display is well-lit with a short label explaining its connection to the overarching theme. Guests are not necessarily required to view every station in order to understand an exhibit as a whole (the large crowds might even inhibit one’s ability to do so), as the sheer quantity of available materials can effectively convey the main narrative. Most exhibit spaces follow this standard approach, which places the objects at the forefront of the visitor experience.
Other exhibits are more stylistic and immersive in their presentation, notably those documenting the Warsaw ghetto and life in the concentration camps. The former occupies a room designed to resemble a typical ghetto street, with news posters plastered on the walls, speakers playing looped recordings of urban sounds, and even cobblestones and street rails from Warsaw itself covering the floor. Visitors can enter mock buildings to access concealed artifacts and information panels. The primary exhibit on camp life likewise simulates its subject matter by forcing guests to enter a tightly-packed room resembling a prisoner barracks. Like the ghetto room, this artificial bunkhouse can give visitors an experiential idea of what life was like for the individuals who inhabited the camps, a method that reinforces the museum’s ground-level narrative focus. Artifact choices like prisoner artwork, clothing, and camp schedules further augment these story-telling choices. Few other exhibit spaces possess the same high level of stagecraft as these two “recreated” rooms, a decision which probably ultimately minimizes distraction from the other objects on display. Still, these reconstructions of the ghetto and the camps can help spark one’s imagination and forge an emotional connection among visitors more easily than the standard presentation methodologies of other exhibits.
Yad Vashem presents its exhibits in a classic “hands-off” manner in which the viewer may look at and read about objects but cannot otherwise interact with them. While this is a traditional approach to object display, the designers of Yad Vashem deserve credit for the quality of their presentations. Aside from artifact labels and occasional graphics featuring maps or photos, most exhibit spaces are very streamlined in appearance. Few massive text panels adorn the walls, shifting the storytelling responsibility to the objects themselves. Some exhibits barely use any text at all. The rooms on the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the Hall of Names largely rely on photographs to make their points. An exhibit on Auschwitz discusses the scale of murder during the Holocaust not with numbers, but by simply presenting viewers with a large hole in the floor full of shoes taken from the victims. While the prioritization of objects over text makes the museum more palatable to a wider range of international guests, studious visitors can often find more detailed information inside clearly-indicated drawers or access panels.
Education potential
Although commemoration of the victims and the selfless heroes of the Holocaust fulfils some of Yad Vashem’s guiding principles, the museum also has a mandate to educate the public on the history and significance of the event. In an age when Holocaust denial garners a disturbing popularity, the importance of this point is crucial. Yad Vashem devotes much of its campus towards this end, particularly its Holocaust research centers. The museum, however, can also contribute to this vital cause. The Yad Vashem museum offers its visitors an opportunity to learn about the Holocaust in a more direct and experiential manner than one might find in a book or the classroom. While the museum is not specifically oriented towards children, the physical artifacts on display convey a level of tangibility to historical discussions that younger learners might find especially helpful. Immersion in rooms like the Warsaw ghetto can likewise provide a first-hand way of understanding history that can serve as a launching point for studies into more complicated subjects. The museum’s focus on the victims’ stories and its heavy reliance on their personal objects also encourage visitors to relate to those who experienced the Holocaust and try to understand it from a different perspective. Visiting Yad Vashem itself not only fosters a deeper knowledge of history, but its location can also prompt enlightening discussions on the complex relationship between the modern state of Israel and the Holocaust.
Several of the educational benefits listed above are not necessarily unique to Yad Vashem. Museums as a whole generally enjoy the pedagogical advantages offered by their collections and exhibition spaces, though this fact does not discount the importance of Yad Vashem in this regard. Aside from the massive size of its object collection, the Yad Vashem museum has a specific learning potential that no other institution possesses. In addition to memorializing 4.7 million Jews and displaying 600 photographs, the museum’s Hall of Names contains a massive repository of survivor testimonies and biographies. Approximately two million “Pages of Testimony” fill the large circular shelves enclosing the exhibit, ensuring the survival of precious information and providing an unparalleled source of research.
According to the museum, many Holocaust survivors did not tell their personal accounts to their children (though they often did discuss them with their grandchildren). Their reasons for silence were too complex and varied to discuss here, but an unfortunate effect of those decisions is that large portions of Holocaust history have gone unrecorded. The Hall of Names’ repository has done much to ameliorate this tragedy, but the museum also offers visitors a chance to interact directly with Holocaust survivors themselves (or their descendants). While this opportunity is sadly disappearing as survivors pass away, it nevertheless adds to the considerable educational potential of Yad Vashem.
