Katherine Ariano
MS 301
March 14, 2005
Prof. Louis Spence

Walking Under “Arbeit Macht Frei”

In the sixth chapter of his book, Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole deconstructs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Cole derives meaning out of the existence of the museum, as well as examines its place on the world stage along side the Israeli Yad Vashem Museum.  Clearly, as Cole presents, there stand two views of the Holocaust—the American view and the Israeli view.  These outlooks portray the feelings of each country, and are encapsulated uniquely in each museum.  Cole also examines the American museum itself—the displays hold meaning behind them and unlock doors which show how America views itself in Holocaust history.  The deconstructing of the USHMM leads Cole, in the final pages of his chapter, to a thought provoking analysis of the American taste for violence in media.  Throughout this chapter, it becomes clear that, although America claims the Holocaust is an American event for many reasons, it really is not treated in that way within the museum walls.  This is apparent when examining how the Israeli and American Museums illustrate their “Holocausts.”  Cole makes clear the difference between a memorial museum that remembers and respects, verses one which leads its visitors into the victim's shoes.  He also addresses the dangers of making visitors believe they understand what it was like to be in the Holocaust. 

The beginning of the chapter focuses on aspects and arguments around the birth of the US Museum.  Particularly these arguments focus on the influence around its existence and the reaction of the Israeli Museum to the United States Museum.  Up until April 1993, when the US Museum opened, the Israeli Yad Vashem Museum had been the Holocaust Museum whose scale rivaled any existing Holocaust Museum in the United States (Cole 146).  Cole accounts that when the USHMM opened, “the staff at the Yad Vashem expressed fears that their authoritative position in exhibiting the ‘Holocaust' was seriously threatened” (Cole 146).  These pages of Cole's chapter are littered with phrases relating to the supposed “‘Americanization' of the ‘Holocaust',” and the “undermining [of] Israel's centrality” (Cole 147).  “The response of the Yad Vashem has been to launch a project to build something to rival the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The ‘Holocaust' is quite literally being fought over” (Cole 147). 

Six years after Cole accounts of the plans for the Yad Vashem renovation, the New York Times covers the story.  In a February 13, 2005 article, in the Arts and Leisure section of the paper, Steven Erlanger writes a story entitled, “Israel Dares to Recast a Story Set in Stone.”  The article tells that this month the Yad Vashem opens its doors to “a new Holocaust History Museum” (Erlanger).  The aims of the original museum were to “document and commemorate the victims and honor those who resisted, it was also charged with educating future generations, [imparting] the facts, legacy and meaning of the Holocaust” (Erlanger).  These aims are expanded with the new museum which seeks to relay the story of Jewish difficulty and inform visitors of the event beyond artifacts to personal accounts—“the goal is not just to show the artifact, but also to tell the tale of the person who owned it and to try to tell the story of the Holocaust from the victim's point of view” (Erlanger). 

The new Yad Vashem Museum, which literally means “a monument and a name,” uses architecture to attach a deeper meaning to the whole experience the place encapsulates (Erlanger).  The overall shape of the Holocaust Museum is spike-like and placed in and atop a mountain—the Mount of Remembrance—near Jerusalem.  This main hall is roofed in skylights and leads out to a balcony overlooking Jerusalem; however the walk way does not allow visitors to go straight towards the light they see, instead, they must veer off into the individual galleries off the main straightaway.  Erlanger relays that the forcing of visitors through the architecture to “enter galleries in a strict order” parallels the paths of the victims who were “forced along by history” (Erlanger).  “Each one of these” forced movements in the museum “represents a historical turning point and each gallery…tries to personify the experience with testimonies and artifacts” (Erlanger). 

The architects continually use shapes, direction and texture of the structure to convey meaning.  There are many unfinished surs in the new Holocaust Museum which tunnels down into the Mountain of Remembrance.  These techniques are used to strike up specific emotions.  For example: as visitors enter the gallery for Auschwitz, the floor slopes down so “you feel you're getting deeper into the earth;” also, in the Hall of Remembrance “there is an excavation through the bedrock, deep into the earth, that mirrors the cone above and ends with a pool of water, which reflects the s [the pictures and testimonies of victims] from above. If the s represent the known dead, the abyss represents the three million more…whose names are not known” (Erlanger).

This decade long renovation seems to have produced a significant piece of architecture to house Israel's Holocaust Museum.  “The renovation…began in the 1990's after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum…reset the bar for museums of its kind” (Erlanger).  Both museums strive to relay a personal experience to the visitors.  Yad Vashem attempts to do this by relaying the personal experience of the victims.  Artifacts are accompanied with stories of those who owned them, and art of victims stands as a large part to the museum.   The Yad Vashem Museum does not only consist of this one building, the Holocaust History Museum, but it is a campus that houses about twenty nine other structures including an International School for Holocaust Studies, a Hall of Names, the Hall of Remembrance, the Holocaust Art Museum and Auditorium, and many monuments and squares. 

Meaning permeates every inch of the Yad Vashem.  The Holocaust History Museum, the long concrete structure, opens up to a balcony, after the maze of galleries has been conquered.  The balcony overlooks Jerusalem.  Mr. Shalev, the chairman of the Yad Vashem, stated:

We conclude with the establishment of the Jewish state, and that's it…we don't have any messages to sell you…we just want to give you, as objectively as we can, the history, the context and the real stories of people who tried to keep their human dignity, and their human values, and what they built along the way.  You'll take your own lessons away... if it's relevant to you, you'll do something with it (Erlanger).

When Israel remembers the Holocaust, be it through museum or otherwise, the focus is on the “martyrs and heroes” and the final emergence of Israel out of the gloom (Cole150).  When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives its account of the Holocaust, focus is given to “victims,” “survivors” and “liberators” (Cole 150).  At this point in the chapter, Cole points out that these two museums are not rivals, instead, “the two museums are involved in quite different projects. In many ways they offer different ‘Holocausts' to different audiences…different people, in different places” (Cole 150).  

Cole goes on to analyze the meanings that the USHMM and the Yad Vashem offer.  In Israel, at the Yad Vashem, the meaning bestowed upon the Holocaust is the sense that it “[ushered] in the nation of Israel” (Cole 153).  In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the meaning is one of our place as ‘liberator'—not ‘perpetrator'—being strengthened as we enter the ‘Holocaust'” (Cole 153). As one can derive from these two points of view, “in some ways the ‘Holocaust' is presented as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself” (Cole 153).  This is a very interesting observation which, understandably, helps along the ability to grasp this horrific event and move past it.  Both countries served as a place for those uprooted by the Holocaust to resettle and start anew.  In Israel's eyes, the Holocaust pushed the founding of Israel as a Jewish homeland—this is the final focus of the Yad Vashem Museum.  In America's eyes, the Holocaust was helped to an end by our troops.  “Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum point to new beginnings through a discourse of ‘rebirth' and ‘liberation'. It is an event that is given redemptive closure” (Cole 153).

“Rather than being peripheral to American History…the ‘Holocaust' [is] a part of American history because America had been and indifferent bystander during the 1930's and 1940's, American troops had liberated a number of concentration camps and many survivors had emigrated to the United States after the war” (Cole 149).  The center focus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as stated above, looks at the victims, survivors and the role of America as a liberator. 

The first images visitors are bombarded with upon entering the USHMM are images of US troops liberating the concentration camps.  When waiting for the elevator, “the flags of the ‘liberating' US Army divisions” stand guard; upon entering the elevator, footage of “US troops discovering” the camps, and testimony of some US soldiers; as the elevator doors open, in black and white, there is a picture of “US troops staring at a pile of half-burnt corpses at the Ohrdurf Concentration Camp” (Cole 152).  In this particular photograph, the US troops stand on the other side of the pyre, and Cole makes the observation that as visitors filter out of the elevator and examine the photograph, they make a circle around the corpses with the US troops in the photo (Cole 152). 

Already the sense of whose museum one has entered is very strong.  The liberation is the first thing the museum-goers are hit with.  Cole makes the note that in starting with the liberation, “before we experience ‘destruction',” we are “handed a mental map within which to operate. There is a sense of closure at the very opening of this telling of the ‘Holocaust'” (Cole 152).  “Everything we see from now on is read through the light of that ending” (Cole 153). 

The museum “aims to tell the story of the Holocaust as the negation of American ideals” (Cole 154).  Cole claims that the United States looks at Germany as the other.  They did this. They were not Americans like us.  The identification of the other makes the enemy clear and defined.  Cole then leads his readers to the conclusion that “a framework is established that teaches us to see the ‘Holocaust' as an un-American crime” (Cole 155).  America's position as a “land of liberty” made her a home for many who sought a home after the war was ended (Cole 148).

Like the US troops in the picture outside the elevator on the third floor, “we… have encountered someone else's crime, and stare…with a mixture of disgust and fascination” (Cole 155).  The US Holocaust Memorial Museum makes its visitors feel as if they are part of the liberating coalition of US troops stumbling upon the Holocaust unknowingly.  The title of “liberator” designated to America, and therefore Americans in the museum, allow for “the dynamic of making the ‘Holocaust' a part of American history, and yet also representing it as alien to American values” (Cole 155).  Cole's choice of the word “fascination” stands as an interesting one which proves to be a strong underlying current to the entire motif of the USHMM.  The museum, around every corner, unlocks the covered secrets of how bad it really was. 

“TV monitors [show] the forbidden fruit of what ‘they'—…the Nazis…—did” (Cole 155).  It is at this point in the chapter that Cole begins to ponder the American taste for violence.  He relays accounts of museum goers who found the thickest, of the already thick crowd, was standing at the “video terminals that show medical experimentation or the burying of the dead” (Cole 155).  This is referred to by Cole as “a peepshow Holocaust” (Cole 156).  “'Violence and the grotesque are central to the American aesthetic, and the Holocaust museum provides both amply' in an exhibition which has the ‘potential for excitement, for titillation, and even for seduction by the overwhelmingly powerful imagery'” (Cole 156).  This factor of “excitement” and “titillation” are not the sole reason for American's fascination with the Holocaust.  Instead, Cole believes that it is the excitement combined with the otherness, “and thus being portrayed as the great antithesis to all-American values” which keeps the museum attendance up at around five thousand daily (Cole 156, 147). 

On the issue of violence, Susan Sontag, in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, states that “there is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (Sontag 41).  Her arguments evolve to questioning the great falsehood surrounding film and photography in society: viewers automatically accept the image as the truth—“a single photograph or a filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera's lens” (Sontag 47).  However she notes, on photography and film, “it is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Sontag 46).  This point stands firm and deserves acknowledgement whenever a piece of media is consumed, however it is very often overlooked.

Whatever significance one bestows upon the American obsession with violence and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the fact that the obsession is being fed by the museum stands as an undeniable observation.  “There is no place for ‘Holocaust and [Jewish] heroism' in Washington, DC, but only Jewish victimization, and the telling of the story of the ‘Holocaust' in all its gory horror” (Cole 157).  Cole's observations, especially when examined against the values which the Yad Vashem Museum focuses on, seem to be frighteningly true. 

In her book Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken analyzes the dangers of media—most specifically the moving image, but she also talks about photography—and the ability of media to completely replace a person's memory of an event.  “On one hand, photographed, filmed, and videotaped images can embody and create memories; on the other hand, they have the capacity, through the power of their presence to oblate them” (Sturken 20).  She analyzes “the role of the image in producing both memory and amnesia, both cultural memory and history” (Sturken 20).  With traumatic imagery around every corner and in every nook of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sturken's observations ring true.  There has to be some effect on the museum patron after becoming a spectator of the Holocaust through actual images and artifacts.  After emerging from the USHMM, at the simple mention of the word “Holocaust,” a plethora of newly observed images and information floods the mind.  Sturken's analysis of media focuses on more modern events (beginning with the Kennedy assassination).  However the statements and conclusions she makes in her book can easily be applied to the situation of violence in the USHMM.  Museum spectators find themselves drenched in visuals of the Holocaust.  These images have the power to overshadow personal experience with the Holocaust, (memories of friends or neighbors involved in it), and replace them with the gruesome images from the USHMM.

When Sturken speaks of “cultural memory and history” it provides a very interesting deconstruction to the two Holocausts that Cole speaks of (Sturken 20).  The cultural memory of Israel is ringing in the halls of its museum.  That cultural memory and history, and in many ways the cultural mission, stands as remembrance.  Simultaneously, the cultural memory of the Holocaust in America's eyes is found in every nook of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  That cultural memory, which permeates everything, is the violence, and therefore the cultural history that Americans remember when reflecting on the Holocaust becomes violence and America's role in stopping it. 

The mission of the Yad Vashem is an undeniably noble one.  The Israeli museum attempts to put s to the Holocaust.  Where s are not available, stories and personal accounts, and where neither is available, to simply remember and honor, as with the Hall of Remembrance.  The Israeli Museum's relationship with the Holocaust is a close one.  These people were Israel's people, whether or not they lived in the modern state of Israel, and now that they have died unjustly, the Yad Vashem, in a way, has brought them home through memory and remembrance. 

Falling into the same issue of framing an event brought up by Sontag, the USHMM frames the Holocaust in one light, and the Yad Vashem frames the Holocaust in a completely different light.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a much different relationship with the Holocaust.  It stands removed from the Holocaust.  The victims are a mass of six million, not really individuals; aside from those we all know, like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel.  This mass was tortured, worked, starved, and killed—and the American museum, through artifacts and media, will show you exactly how. 

As visitors walk through the permanent exhibition they encounter many of the actual artifacts of the Holocaust.  There are bunks and food bowls from Auschwitz, the uniforms prisoners were made to wear, flags that liberated camps, personal possessions, Nazi artifacts, crematorium doors, tables and instruments, and actual footage, just to name a few.  There stands an iron casting of the entrance to Auschwitz so museum goers walk under “Arbeit Macht Frei” (roughly translated, “Work Frees”) just as the victims did.  Television screens mounted everywhere show actual footage, and testimonies of survivors.  The USHMM seems to be trying to show its visitors exactly what it was like to be in the Holocaust.  Around every turn a TV set is mounted showing a sequence of images that makes one think to oneself those poor people.  The use of identity cards in the USHMM was an attempt to “'personalize the concept of victims',” and help visitors to related to the Holocaust victims.  However, as Cole mentions, the visitors are also being asked to relate to the US Servicemen who liberated the camps.  “I'm trying to become the ‘victim Mendel', but I'm also trying to be the US serviceman who liberated the camps in the film footage being shown on the monitor” (Cole 163).  No doubt it stands as a much easier task for an American museum patron to relate to the Americans, someone who could easily be a next door neighbor, someone whose mindset can be related to, someone who knows our national anthem, rather than a European Jew on a card handed out after one has forked over the necessary entrance fee. 

When Cole stated that Israel and the United States offer “two different Holocausts” he is surprisingly right, and these differences are rooted in the relationships each country truly feels with the Holocaust.  The Holocaust happened to Israeli citizens—Jews.  The American relationship with the Holocaust is one of the hands which opened the door of freedom to the enslaved, and eventually became home to many; but by no means is America's relationship with the Holocaust, at least as portrayed through the USHMM, as personal and reverent as that of Israel's.

Again Cole deconstructs the USHMM when he dubs it with the title of an “anti-museum” (Cole 158).  “At this anti-museum we are self-consciously told what if means to be ‘American' by being given a taste of what it means to not be ‘American'” (Cole 158).  This chapter in Cole's book seems to be a meeting ground among all the theories Cole has touched upon in previous chapters.  As stated earlier in the book, Cole sees the American attention given to the Holocaust as a scapegoat for other American atrocities that the country would prefer to ignore.  “It is so much easier to look at someone else's racism, intolerance, dictatorship and persecution than to confront the racism, intolerance, dictatorship and persecution in either our own past or our own present” (Cole 158)

Concluding on a note of warning, Cole tells his readers that although visitors may emerge from the museum with a feeling that they have just “witnessed” the Holocaust.  They have not.  This is treacherous “because thinking that we understand may just be about the most dangerous thing of all” (Cole 171).  Sturken's belief that memories can be replaced by media frighteningly dovetails with Cole's concern.  Visitors now have memories of the Holocaust thanks to the USHMM displays.  By the end, patrons feel they have been there, but in truth and actuality, they have not.  Cole suggests that “rather than pretending that we understand how and why all this happened, perhaps it would be better to have simply this tower of photographs [the Wall of s in the USHMM] and aoice which says, quietly: ‘look at the s, look at them well. You don't understand, don't try. Just remember'” (Cole 171)

Cole's account of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum paints it as a place focused on the Holocaust as a violent event and America's role in stopping the ultimate completion of the goals set by that event.  Steven Erlanger's account of the Israeli Yad Vashem Museum frames it as a place very closely concerned and attuned to those involved in the Holocaust, and giving the necessary remembrance and time to those whose lives were either taken from them or jaded.  Each country's vantage point on the Holocaust springs not only from its role in the Holocaust, but also from its social needs.  Consequently, Israel and America's portrayal of the Holocaust are very different.  Israel sees the Holocaust as setting the Jews on the path of creating their own nation.  Because of Americans' taste for violence and the grotesque, much of the USHMM focuses around the horrors of the event and America's role in putting an end to it.  Cole weaves his ideas of the previous five chapters together and thusly, using the USHMM as a vehicle he is able to deconstruct aspects of American society that lead to the portrayal of the Holocaust found in the museum, and consequently “the myth of the Holocaust.”  The Holocaust was a horrific event consisting of happenings that can be absorbed or comprehended; but it can never be understood.

Works Cited

Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler How History is Bought,
Packaged and Sold. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Erlanger, Steven. “Israel Dares to Recast a Story Set in Stone.” New York Times.

13 Feb, 2005, Sunday ed.: B16+. http://www.nytimes.com /2005/02/13/arts/design/13erla.html?ex=1266037200&en=abcbeab631c6bb8c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland.

Sontag, Susan.  Regarding the Pain of Others.  New York: Picador, 2004.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: the Vietnam war, the AIDS Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering. Berkely: University of California Press, 1997.

Word Count:  3,763

Previous Page    Back to 2005 CXC Winners    Next Page