the holocaust experience
THE HOLOCAUST EXPERIENCE investigates how the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive on both sides of the Atlantic. It moves between two extremes: the ruins of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the hyper-realistic holocaust museums in America. In the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Poland, a bitter battle is being fought out with time. "Everything here should stay the way it was,". That turns out to be an impossible goal. Some places in the camp, are already overgrown with weeds. While Auschwitz wrestles with its mortality, the virtual Auschwitz in the American holocaust museums are all the rage. Visitors can, at the end of the day, enter a mock gas chamber. The Americans also use authentic material. Cases and striped prisoner's suits and even a complete shed are meticulously conserved and put on show. One museum has even imported the cut hair of people who were gassed from Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the exhibition faced moral objections. Both human effort and impotence are tangible in preserving this part of history for later generations.
Meer info