A trip to New York, one of the must go to activities would be museums. Guggenheim, Metropolitan, MoMA and 9/11 Memorial are always the first choices. They represent art and the history we are related to. But the one museum I am going to talk about is kind of far from us but still remains important - Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Though located just across the Statue of Liberty, the museum is likely to be ignored by tourists, partly because it is not widely advertised. Therefore, it is more for educational purposes that many groups of students from middle schools and high schools would come.
The museum’s core display is on the life stories of the survivors of the Holocaust. When talking about the Holocaust, our first thought is always on Germany, because it is acknowledged the Nazis started the genocide and later developed the notorious Final Solution. Inside of American society, the Jewish population is only a small part of a highly diversified population. Though a large part of the Jewish population now lives in the United States, many would not expect to go to a Jewish or Holocaust museum in America, at least not for the first thought.
Because of my interest in Germany and the Holocaust, I took a class on the Berlin Wall, and we as a class went to Berlin and visited the Jewish Museum there. So, I wondered, how would the Museum of Jewish Heritage differ? And how would American institutions portray the Holocaust?
I guess the main difference is on the focus of the museum. In most museums, personal life stories are always a bonus or support for the main idea, but hardly the core. In the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the life experiences, unjust treatments, and heartbreaking escape stories are introduced. The contents are not only sad but helpless.
The most heartbreaking moment for me was in the current exhibition named New Dimensions In Testimony. It is an installation that made it possible for audiences to "talk" to two specific survivors, Pinchas Gutter and Eva Schloss, and to ask questions through a speaker. At the back of the room are two boards introducing their briefed life stories.
Because Pinchas's parents and twin sister all died in the concentration camps before the liberation, I asked him how the life was like after the end of the war. His answer stroke me so hard that I couldn't stop crying. He said it was his rebirth after liberation, that it felt like nothing happened in those five years (during the Holocaust). He said his relatives took him in and took very good care of him, and there was only once he lost it, screaming and shouting in his room. But after that, everything fell into normal.
I kept thinking, how horrible would his experience be? So horrible that he refuses to remember anything from it? His testimony is much harder to take in than those saying how hard it was to live with all those memories.
I guess there might be some people thinking that I am too emotional, and whatever happened in the Holocaust was not preventable. I understand. But it is exactly the helplessness that triggered my sadness. That even at that time, many countries could have done something sooner but did not, that Jewish people hoped and hoped but no one came until it was too late. It is the idea that we did nothing to help those people made my heartbreak.
But it is also the reason for us to remember the history, so our generation and later generations know all the survivors' and victims' sufferings are not for nothing.
I highly recommend this museum. And I hope, other than the rationality we have, the emotional part of us would not be beaten up and then disappear.
Museum of Jewish Heritage website:https://mjhnyc.org
