The country The experience of different directors on the Holocaust memorial Show
horror is not enough
In a seminar organized by the Secretariat
Human Rights, experts discussed how museums should function to generate a memory self-critical eye on visitors and avoid the simple attribution of evil to others.
The entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz, where he now runs a museum that covers 190 hectares .
By Laura Vales
How should run a museum of memory? Do they get the visitor memorials change, or delegate to others, provided the Nazis, dictators, occupying forces, all evil, limiting critical thinking about one's ability to harm? Yariv Lapid, the Memorial of Mauthausen (Austria), posed the question with an air of defiance. Beside him sat the assistant director of the Auschwitz Museum. It was at an international seminar held in Buenos Aires, where directors Holocaust memorials recounted their experiences to an audience of, mostly hand, those working in the building of the Argentine memory spaces.
The meeting was organized by the Secretariat
Human Rights
Nation and European experts met last week. Lapid, the most acidic of the exhibitors, working on the design of a new educational infrastructure Mauthausen Memorial, where he ran the largest Nazi concentration camp in Austria. It was from this role was a series of revealing cases not on memory but on the mechanisms of forgetting.
The Memorial of Mauthausen was the largest Nazi concentration camp in Austria. Had, Lapid told, forty subfields within Austrian territory, some of them in Vienna, the capital, although this was not recorded in the collective memory. The subfields were usually places where industrial factories had mounted weapons of war that prisoners used as slave labor. Therefore, each population civilians were aware of the existence of prisoners and contact fields.
After the war, in Austria more than 130 thousand people were convicted of participating in Nazi crimes. However, in 1957 the Austrian government pardoned them all in the name of "integration" society.
Lapid asked 24 students from the Mauthausen Memorial to talk to their families about their memories of war. "80 percent had a sub in his hometown, but I did not know. Students traveled 50 kilometers
to learn how well the Mauthausen concentration camp, while they had a sub in your area that had been erased from memory. Everything was delegated to Mauthausen. "
Another example of the delegation mechanism reported was the documentary The grandfather was a Nazi, a result of 300 interviews conducted in Germany to investigate what stories were told in the within families. In cases where a grandfather had participated in Nazi crimes, said, "this family" ever became a virtuoso for the third generation. " The family changed its story: "Even if the person had been tried and convicted, the family story saying things like: was a good father" or being argued that the Nazis had tried to save lives. Evil was always exercised by others. "The environments are intimate and non-contaminated by evil."
To Lapid, memorials tend to repeat this procedure for the delegation. "When we have that the perpetrators crimes were ordinary people, this causes internal conflict. We like to make a proposal to the students in a workshop to look that everyone can admit their own potential evil. Can we be all potential evil? Are you among our ability to do such things? "But this is not the rule. "The memorials are places quite ambiguous, because its success depends on the failure of the visitor, and do not know if that's something we're really getting. What we apply to them is still almost always the police. "
That is not Disneyland Auschwitz
The Auschwitz Museum has an extension of 190 hectares in what was the concentration camp. His deputy, Teresa Swiebocka said that Auschwitz is a graveyard without graves and a school. In its vicinity there were several factories, including what was the largest chemical plant in Europe, where work was carried prisoners. The museum has material on the resistance movements that were in Auschwitz, are the ruins of what were the gas chambers and the documentation generated during the subsequent trials of the Nazis. There are also places where people do religious ceremonies. The management of the site is to unite all those records.
The museum was created at the request of the survivors (when liberated the concentration camp in him about seven thousand people), who mounted the first exhibition in 1947, two weeks before the Act was passed for its creation. Discussions on how to work is ongoing. One is whether to restore facilities destroyed by the Nazis, to show how they worked, or leave everything as is. It happens that those responsible for the field in his last days, dismantled the crematoria to destroy all evidence of the crimes. Where the gas chambers were left ruined.
"Some wanted to rebuild the crematoria with all the details, and others, however, leave the site as is, with the proposition that the original site, even if in ruins, is much more important than rebuilding, "said Swiebocka. And indeed, although some sectors were reconstructed account-this has been the predominant position.
- Why?
"Because we want nothing artificial. We do not want a Disneyland-Pagina/12 said the assistant.
The issue is, however, edges unresolved. One is that there are sectors where the ruins-was Swiebocka-are collapsing slowly. "We do not know what the best solution, be sincere to the audience.
There are sectors that have been prepared to show visitors the living conditions of prisoners and what life was like in the field, including the killing process. Mount these exposures involved decide what to show and what not. "First of all, we want to show corpses. Sometimes you need and put photos, but people have to understand, no pictures of those horrors, which are all a lost generation. It is important that visitors feel that kind of empathy, "said Swiebocka. "We show yes, the items found after the release. When the visitor sees two thousand bags, eighty thousand shoes, imagination can grasp the magnitude of what happened. At the same time we also show the individuality, the story of a suitcase. "
in Birkenau, Auschwitz sector where they were killed most victims, it was decided to leave the soil of the field intact. There is one exhibition mounted in the building known as Sauna, location was recorded and disinfection of newly arrived prisoners. Sauna in the walls were left in their original condition, but the floor was placed a special glass that visitors do not walk over the original. In open places of Birkenau were placed posters are both explanation and remembrance, with photos, for example, women walking to the gas chamber. To Lapid, exposing visitors to the vision of the atrocities are not necessarily those sensitized. "Most of the exhibits are related to display images, photographs, visual narratives. We believe that people change just to see them, not necessarily. The truth is that not one hundred percent understand how to portray the torture and murder, but we can say something with certainty: display is not enough. "
