Behind the Scenes of the Holocaust Memorial Center

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Behind the Scenes

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Over the summer of 2021 I completed an internship at the Holocaust Memorial Center, which gave me access to all sorts of new materials and responsibilities. I spent a great deal of time maturing my understanding of human rights and the process of museum education.

I sat down with director, Mark Mulder, to talk about the future of the museum and the importance of museums in teaching Holocaust memory. Director Mulder, speaks about proposed changes to expand visitors experience to help modern audiences better understand the environment which lead to the holocaust.

Interview with Director Mark Mulder

Full Transcript included below

“There is really two approaches to the way that we’re redesigning the exhibit, two reasons, one is just purely visual. Colors are outdated, the panels are fading, they’re not staying on the wall as much, the exhibit is 18 years old, it’s time to rethink things. So, content wise we want to realign what we’re talking about with our values as an organization. One of the things that I’m really interested in doing is not separating out what it means to be a Jewish person or what Jewish culture is as a standalone thing and incorporating it into the exhibit as a whole. The way that we currently have the exhibit arranged I think sets Jewish people Jewish culture as too much of an other and makes it too unrelatable in a way you know?

The examples I typically give are you know oh look there’s different months on the calendars, praying is different, different schools, all that stuff, we don’t even call small towns small towns they’re called shtetls. Instead of harping on all of that which the uniqueness of Jewish culture, which is important, and that will be expressed, but I also want there to be an element of what do we have in common with maybe Jewish culture today, world culture today, and especially Michigan culture today. If you’re a student walking in here what does a Jewish person who lived in 1930 has to do with you, you know? And why should you care? The answer is that you have a lot in common. The approach will be to try to balance what’s different, what’s unique, and you can connect. A really good example is a shtetl. A shtetl is a small Jewish town, and there’s a video that we use on the mobile guide that we’ve been producing that shows video footage of a shtetl. The video is taken in the 1930s and they’re doing everyday things. They’re standing outside of a shop, there are kids who are curious like what is this? I mean it’s what you would get anywhere in the world and that’s the type of connection I want to make, I want people to recognize that there were Jewish towns, and they were small, they had some unique aspects to them, but they’re also just a small town not unlike maybe the small town you and I are from. The other side of that is kind of applying the research that I’ve been doing into how to better communicate issues of the Holocaust in terms of like the violent imagery using more academic approaches to the content so that would be inquiry based model for the design.

Some examples of inquiry based model and how we use it is that most exhibits typically are built around something called big idea, you ask so what until you’ve answered the question. So the inquiry model, the way that we’re thinking about doing it is not just that the entire exhibit has one of these big ideas, it’s that the smaller exhibits like individual sections of the exhibit also have one and it’s a question and that question is answered in the text. The ideal is that we give people, instead of lecturing to our visitors, to answer the question we either show them where they can spend a few minutes finding the answer or help them see the answer on the walls or with a reference. In order to do that we’re going to have to go through the exhibit and rethink every single aspect of it, so it’s no longer this is how they got out, it’s what options did families have? As the Nazis came to power and as they started losing rights, what options did people have to escape? Kinder transport is one possible answer, and why was it hard to leave might be another thing.

The overall thought process here is that we’re giving people agency but maybe you’re on a tour group, you don’t want to have to answer that question OK, you don’t have to. You’re probably gonna hear the answer one way or the other but what we see on a regular basis and as a tour guide you probably see this is that there’s a lot of people that we get to see but they’re super interested. You might walk them through a room and you see them all looking at something but it’s not on the tour right? We want to eliminate that, we want to give people a sense of agency in what they’re learning and also kind of tap into that sense of wonder that awe. What is that? You know? Give them an opportunity to go see it. That’s kind of the broad fall process that goes into renovating the exhibit, giving people not just a more contemporary looking exhibit which is important, but right up to these issues of giving people a sense that their visit here was as effective and as personal as possible.

A line that I sometimes fall back on when I’m talking to the board about why we’re doing this whatever is that you know someone who’s in eighth grade right now 1933 might as well be 1080 or 1066 right? Like it might as well be the medieval period because that’s bordering on three generations for a lot of them. It probably is three generations and so they might not know anybody that was alive in World War Two and getting them to connect to the subject is a challenge, which gets us to the Third Point which is using our local Holocaust survivor stories and also local stories of families who lost family in the Holocaust, because I don’t want the narrative to be people survived the Holocaust; some did but a lot didn’t, it isn’t the Holocaust because people survived right? But those are the people that were there and could tell us what happened. Why should I, or even an expert historian, try to tell you what happened when we can have someone who lived it tell their story. We can talk about one of our survivors who went through Auschwitz, there are a number of different ways of approaching it, you know?

There is also the issue of the kind of tools which I’m going to apply in order to make the biggest impact, but this is the idea, using and utilizing compassion as a tool and not trying to force empathy on visitors. There’s several reasons to using compassion, one is that we want our to honor our visitors and what they’ve been through themselves; the word trauma comes up a lot and that’s a very real thing, we don’t know what our visitors have been through, but we do you know is scientifically if we trigger a visitors fight or flight system, you know, if we put them into that state of fight or flight they’re not learning it and that is a evolutionary thing. you’re not learning you’re reacting to stimulus. That is bad, you know? You’re not even digesting food, you’re not really thinking with the logical part of your brain, and so avoiding putting people even accidentally into that as much as possible while still honoring the realities of what happened is gonna be really difficult. There are different ways to do that so we could, you know, in our tours and in how we put up captions to exhibits and to images and even how we use graphic images we cannot try to put people in the position of imaging themselves in that scenario. That’s a really common thing and it’s surprisingly relevant that people will do simulations all the time and those people are stuck in this idea that empathy is somehow better.

Empathy is wonderful and it is a perfectly reasonable response to seeing imagery or hearing a person’s story. We naturally for the most part, people naturally relate to other people, and that’s perfectly fine; however, we don’t want to rely on that because of those issues of trauma but also because, and this is tough sounding language, but it also in a way dehumanizes the person and limits their experience to your worldview of their experience and that’s not really fair to the survivor. I actually read something just last week that also talked about the fact that if we think we already know someone’s perspective and what they’ve been through, if you think yeah, I know I understand what they’ve been through, we’re not as good of listeners, we’re not as good of speakers if we’re meant to talk about it, because we’re only thinking about it through our perspective. Compassion, you know, the definitions we’re relying on here by the way, is that empathy is that I feel your pain and compassion is I understand that you have pain that I wanna do something about it. Those are based on scientific research that defines those things and how they differ from each other and how they differ from things like pity or sadness or any of the other thing.

like kind of results of viewing negative outcomes we can word things in such a way where we’re pushing people to think about the injustice of what we say. So, an example, that I know you’ve seen, but an example is an image of the Reichstag Fire, and instead of asking our visitors or asking a tour group what do you think it felt like to watch your synagogue burned down and have nobody do anything about it, because the likelihood is that no one in that group knows. The task is just to ask them what do you notice is happening in this photo? People will say oh there’s a fire, it’s always the first thing they say. OK what else? Oh there’s a lot of people standing around. Does it look like they’re doing anything? No, no they’re not doing anything. What don’t you see in this? Well, I see no firefighters. Now you’re building into the injustice and people start to see well that’s not right, why aren’t there firefighters? People are better, I think personally, and this is anecdotal, at compassion than they are empathy in terms of accuracy right? So, we tend to have, I think, that we are very good at spotting things that are unfair or unjust or mean or whatever. We are not geared to seeing someone’s perspective on an emotional level. We try to and we fail, for all the reasons that I mentioned before: that we can’t, that we don’t know what it’s like to be that person, and that all of our experiences are kind of the culmination of the sum total of all the things that happened before.”

Check out our other 2021 presenters