Posted on 08/19/2017 8:56:04 AM PDT by beaversmom
Susan Snyder has been a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the past 26 years. She travels the country, and sometimes Europe, meeting with people who have collections of Holocaust artifacts and memorabilia. Last week, she came to Chicago on a collecting trip and took a few minutes to explain to Forward contributor Aimee Levitt what the museum is looking for and what it does with the material it finds.
The museum started collecting before it was built. The first collections came in 1984, but they didn’t start building till 1988. In 1989, it put ads in major newspapers for people who had artifacts to contact the museum. There was an influx then. After we opened in 1993, we thought it would slow down, but it didn’t. The museum steadily gets between 300 and 400 collections a year. We catalog and put as much as possible online. We want to make everything available to scholars and researchers.
We have become the major repository for Holocaust historical material in this country and one of the major repositories in the world. We have curators in Poland, France and Germany; people who help out in Hungary, and other people who identify collections overseas. We’ve done surveys in European countries, in the former USSR and in Central and South American countries. We just signed new agreements with Romania for archival material that was unavailable during the Cold War.
The most important thing is, I’m using our own collections for research, which is fabulous. I feel fortunate to walk out into the reading room and do research there. We just opened a new research center in Maryland, the Shapell Center. It’s state of the art. A lot of research and scholarship are done out there. I was just there with an Irish Ph.D. student who was studying [displaced persons] camps. She was able to look at prewar films, textiles, Joint Distribution Committee-produced Judaica, a wedding dress a woman made from parachute that she got from bartering coffee and cigarettes, crafts.
It’s very important everything is accessible at a public facility. The museum has a database of a quarter of a million pages. Seventeen million people were persecuted under Nazism, both Jewish and non-Jewish. We’re not just trying to find victims but also to help people remember where they were. Postwar, records were taken from the camps to a central location so they wouldn’t be destroyed. In 2008, we were able to get a digital copy. The original lives in Germany.
Our goal is to be the best resource possible, to give people answers. If that means a denier walks in off of the street to use our facilities, we have no choice. We’re federally-funded.
For me, the best thing about our collection is that we only work with private collections. The people donating the collections are survivors or the friends and children of survivors. We encourage people to at least to talk to us, whether or not they’re willing to donate.
given the way the germans are so pathetically dying and being replaced by moslems —it looks to me like the memory of the holocaust is slowly killing western civilization. Nor is this a good thing for Israel.
A Cherished Object: Kristine Keren’s Green Sweater
Curator Susan Snyder shares the story behind the donation of a young girl’s green sweater—a gift the girl received from her grandmother and wore while hiding from the Nazis in the sewers of Lvov, Poland, for 14 months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adwU_M1rdTA
One could argue...*strongly* argue...that it's vital that the crimes committed by the Nazis,the Japanese and the Russians should be chronicled for posterity.It's my understanding that that has been done quite well when it comes to Hitler...millions of photos,videos,Nazi documents,eyewitness accounts,among other things.
Well,if that's what motivates this woman...
In the 80's I visited Munich and literally stumbled upon the knowledge that Dachau was nearby.When I learned this I asked several Germans if they could help me get there.Nobody wanted to be involved.I didn't realize until later that that was because the typical German...at that time,at least...was very,*very* uncomfortable talking about the Nazis.It seems to me that a sense of national guilt is still driving them.
Also,it must be noted that Merkel is an *East* German..educated in their schools,subject to their propaganda,subject to their culture.East Germany was founded on a hatred of the Nazis that was stronger than that found in Britain,France,the US.And that's as well as a hatred for the West.Having her as "Prime Minister" is a lot like us having Bill Ayers as President,IMO.
Did you find any of those human skin lampshades that the NAZIs made?
I’m not the curator, and I don’t quite understand the question.
Doesn’t Soros have some contributions?
The largest ethnic group in Stalin’s party killing machine were great Russians. The second largest group was Russian jews. Huge sections of Russia’s jews moved to Israel. I’ve read Israeli journalists who freely acknowledge this —go to Germany and try to talk about it—as a way to bring the Germans out of their guilt torpor. But the Germans wouldn’t have it.
I visited Dachau in 1992. Drove past it twice before I saw a small sign pointing to the parking lot. Also went to nearby raven where German soldiers took a truck load of prisoners out each day for target practice.
I assume "morbidly depressing" is fairly high up on the list?
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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I keep my grandfather’s yellow star framed by my door, along with his “papers” with a big red “J” on it.
I call it my “I’m not having a bad day; that’s a bad day”, frame.
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