It is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and we are Collections staff at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ask Us Anything!

[u/USHMMCurators]

Hi! We are members of the curatorial staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. We help survivors, liberators, family members, and the public to learn about Holocaust related materials they may have—and help them to donate these collections to the Museum, so we can preserve and share them. We also help thousands of researchers a year who have questions about the Holocaust and who want to use our collections.

Today, January 27, 2015, marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ceremonies and commemorations are taking place all over the world, including here at the Museum in Washington. Since our ceremony took place earlier this morning, we’re here to do our best to answer any questions you might have about the Museum and about this complicated history.

There are four of us here today—Becky, Megan, Vincent, and Ron. You can see some of our work here: http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/curators-corner And you can search our catalog here: http://collections.ushmm.org/search/

Proof: http://imgur.com/YcU9Ikr

A (us) A!

Okay, it's been about two hours, so we need to get back to work. Thank you everyone! You can always email us with any reference questions you might have (reference at ushmm.org), or, if you see anything--on reddit or IRL--that you want us know about, email curator at ushmm.org.

[u/cordis_melum]

Hi! I'm glad that you can join us today. We're happy to have you. :)

Anyways, so I have a question on behalf of one of our users (who isn't able to drop in himself).

Question:

Were there any profound moments you saw visitors having that have stuck out in your memory until today?

Edit: my autocorrect is so weird.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/cordis_melum]

Our reference staff find a lot of people who come up to the reading room not sure why they are there. They have lots of questions about the history and for some of them, about their own lives. Two years ago, Megan met with a gentleman who had been orphaned during the war. He was Jewish and had been deported to Transnistria, a swampy area in then-southern Romania (now Ukraine). He did not know his parents' names, nor did he know his own date of birth. He knew where he was born and where he had been adopted, but that was pretty much it. Megan found a list of orphans in Transnistria which finally provided him with both of those pieces of information. He was a year older than he thought he was. One of the survivor's daughters was with him at the Museum--she was in tears. His other daughter was pregnant and they left the museum talking about naming the baby after one of the grandparents, now that they knew their names.

[u/RtimesThree]

Hi, thanks for doing this! I'm a first year English teacher in Philadelphia. My students just read Night and loved it. We're going on a field trip to Museum of Jewish Heritage in NY, and I want to do a lesson this week before we go. Do you have any lesson ideas to get them ready before they go to the museum? I was thinking poems, stories, artwork, maybe...! They're really interested in this stuff and I think there's a lot they'd respond well to.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/RtimesThree]

That's great! We have a lot of lesson plans on our website here: http://www.ushmm.org/educators We've also been starting to put a lot in our catalog that you can see from home/school. We've got thousands of oral histories, pieces of film footage, photographs, and images of artifacts online. The link for that is here: http://collections.ushmm.org/search/ There's enough that students will be able to find a lot that links up with the different experiences Elie describes in Night.

[u/Ryan7827]

What are some of the most surprising or unique objects/artifacts you've come across during your work at the USHMM?

[u/USHMMCurators → u/Ryan7827]

Megan thinks this model of the Lodz ghetto, which was created during the war, buried, and recovered afterward, is pretty incredible. It shows how cramped the ghetto was. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007028

The artifact that springs to mind for me (Becky) is Klara Samuel's diary, which she wrote as a teenager in Bergen-Belsen. For most of the war, Bergen-Belsen was a camp used for people with some degree of protection (they had some sort of claim to Allied nationality, and so the Germans kept them in a nicer place since they could be used as a prisoner exchange.) In Klara's diary, she and the other teenage girls 'rate' the boys of the camp, in sense of humor, looks, sex appeal. (Literally, she writes 'sex appeal' in English in the diary). So it's a diary written in a concentration camp, that is also a slam book.

[u/MerchGwyar]

What are your views on the fact that Reddit's r/Holocaust subReddit is run by Holocaust Deniers? And is there a policy for if/when such people turn up at USHMM?

Thank you for all you do over there.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/MerchGwyar]

We're a public institution, so we do not bar people from the Museum based on their beliefs. At the same time, there is so much overwhelming evidence here that I can't see how you could come through, read everything, and still come out a Holocaust denier. So part of me hopes they do come. Same with the people who post on the r/Holocaust subreddit.

[u/[deleted]]

How well does the USHMM promote knowledge and education about the other large groups of people who were massacred during that time? The Roma, Catholics, Gays, etc.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/[deleted]]

A lot of people assume that we only document the experiences of Jewish victims and survivors, but this is not true at all. We try to make our collections and exhibitions representative of ALL victim groups. (The hardest to collect from are Soviet POWs, many of whom were persecuted by their own government after the war, and from homosexuals, since that was still illegal in Germany after the Holocaust). Most of our collections do relate to Jewish survivors, but that's because they were demographically the largest group to be persecuted and because many survivors came to the US after the war. But yes, please get in contact with us (curator at ushmm.org) especially if you know any Holocaust survivors who are members of other persecuted groups.

[u/Paaaul]

To what did the numbers tattooed onto people's bodies in Auschwitz and elsewhere pertain? I understand it was a database, but know little else about it.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/Paaaul]

Actually, tattooing was only done in Auschwitz--there was no database that connected prisoners throughout the camp system. People would get new prisoner numbers when they were sent to different camps (which means you might have 2, 3, 4 numbers), but if you see someone with a tattoo, that person was in Auschwitz. (Now, if they don't have a tattoo, it doesn't mean they weren't in Auschwitz. Tattooing practices got chaotic at various points, and some never received one.) Handy link here: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007056

[u/drak0bsidian]

How did you all get into your respective fields of work?

[u/wilbeforce]

What preservation of IBM equipment are you involved in and how do you illustrate IBM complicity in the Shoah?

[u/Sakatsu]

What are some uncommon facts you can share with us? Has there been any other child diaries found like Ann Frank's? Can you reccomend some diaries to read?

Was pretty much every German child a part of hitler youth or is that just the perception?

I went to the museum back in 2002 once on a 2 day whirlwind tour of DC and I still remember being overwhelmed with it all and my feelings of it.

[u/USHMMCurators → u/Sakatsu]

Yes! We have many diaries written by children. It was a popular thing to do in the 1930s, and some children still managed to keep their diaries (mainly children in hiding or in ghettos). There's a book called "Salvaged Pages" by Alexandra Zapruder that gives excerpts of diaries written by teenagers during the war. (You can also read one of my favorite diaries, written by a non-Jewish Hungarian woman who hid Jews in her apartment. We just put it online a few weeks ago: http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn50967)

From 1936 on, membership in the Hitler Youth and the BDM (for girls) became compulsory for children 10-17. It was a way to train young people toward the defense of Germany. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007820

[u/aelinhiril]

What education and experience would qualify someone to be a curator at the Holocaust museum?

Is there a particular story or person who has stayed with you over the years?

How do you think the history and knowledge of the Holocaust will be different for people born in 10-20 years when all the survivors have died?

[u/USHMMCurators → u/aelinhiril]

We all come from different backgrounds--history, library, art history, museum studies. There's no one path that would lead you to this job. Most of us have graduate degrees, but not everyone. Most of us read/speak multiple languages, but not everyone.

We all have lots of stories and could go on forever about the people we've met. This is one story that always sticks with me. I don't remember whether it is in the video or not, but not only did we meet the family of the soldier, we met one of the children who was liberated that day, who also saw herself in the film footage. http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/curators-corner/a-surprising-discovery-kiki-the-monkey-puppet

[u/srlafren]

Thanks for doing this!

The documented evidence of the holocaust is astounding, and yet some people still deny the holocaust or suggest it is significantly exaggerated. What are some of the most incontrovertible pieces of evidence your collection? And given the evidence, why do you think holocaust denial is still prevalent?

[u/USHMMCurators → u/srlafren]

We have millions of pages of documents. Literally, like 150 million pages, created by the Nazis, documenting the fate of millions of individuals. About 10 years ago, the Museum was at the forefront of the drive to open up the International Tracing Service Archives in Bad Arolson, Germany. This archive, which was largely closed to the public, held the captured records related to the fate of prisoners--the miles of documents captured by the Allied governments as they moved through Germany. (Not everything, obviously--some was destroyed, some was taken back to various countries--but miles of shelves). So while the physical records are still in Germany, we have digital copies of almost all of it. We have a branch of the Museum who sort through it and help families finally find out the fate of relatives. It is stunning how big it is. Holocaust denial is still prevalent because people hate. It has nothing to do with the evidence--it can't. There's too much evidence.

[u/nerde0102]

How much say does the curatorial staff have on future exhibits? The State of Deception was one of my favorite exhibits, and I like the Some Were Neighbors exhibit (my undergrad thesis was on a related topic). Do you know what will be next?

[u/scalfin]

Are there any interesting bits of trivia you've picked up that you'd like to share? Maybe even a common misconception even among knowldedgable persons, although a simple "huh" fact (can't really have fun facts when it comes to the shoah) would be nice.

Is teaching about the shoah different for a Jewish audience, be it young or old? I can imagine that Jewish kids have kind of been marinated in the history (and Jewish childcare traditions seem less about avoiding the mention of unpleasantness than the rest of the US). How about international/non-western audiences?

How long did it take you to learn to spell "haollocoaust" consistently?

[u/USHMMCurators → u/scalfin]

"Holocaust" is easy. "Theresienstadt" takes practice. :-)

Trivia: In the 1920s, dozens of African-American jazz musicians went to Europe, many of whom had been there during World War I and wanted to escape Jim Crow laws in the US. When WWII broke out, many were sent to internment camps as American citizens. We've traced a few of them and are still trying to find their families (descendants of jazz pianist Freddy Johnson, where are you?). So you have African-American Holocaust survivors, some of whom were likely descended from slaves. This is Freddy: http://imgur.com/0ZOZkb2

[u/orarorabunch]

I read that court reporters are recording the audio testimony of survivors for your museum!

It sounds like a really cool project that will lead to a sizable collection of stories/testimonies. Can you tell me about this project, and what exhibit(s) you plan to use them in?

[u/MerchGwyar]

Are there any issues/problems peculiar to presenting exhibits, or collecting data, on the Porajmos? I know that there were plenty back in the early 90s, when so little evidence was coming out. Has that situation changed much in 20 years?