Transcripts For CSPAN3 Memorial Museums And Memory 20170419

Tonights program is part of a series of conversations that were hosting, examining the power of memory to shape our future. This season were taking time out to think about why we remember the events that led to the holocaust and other global atrocities and how collective understanding can help us make informed decisions about our future and shape a better world. To learn about this Program Series and all the conversations and programs that we host, we hope youll sign up for the museum email and follow us on social media. Some people have questioned why is there a Holocaust Museum on the National Mall . Or how can we fulfill our mission as a living memorial to the past and the victims while still being relevant enough to engage youth today . Im sure similar Big Questions have been asked of the 9 11 museum about your role and your vision, and tonights conversation will examine that and more. In that regard, its important to note that one of our founders ellie ra zel often said this museum is not an answer but a question. We at the museum say the holocaust poses many questions and its our job to never stop asking why. Tonight were joined by sara bloomfield, shes the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial museum and alice greenwald. Shes tsz the president and koechlt. 9 11 memorial and museum in new york. Sara and alice have been good friends and colleagues for more than 30 years and its an honor to welcome you back to the museum tonight, alice. Tonight theyll give us a behindthescenes look into the creation, the design and impact of living memorials and what they hope the future holds for their institutions andal all o us. And now tonights moderator and the the es steemtd host of nprs Weekend Edition saturday and nbc sunday morning, scott simon. Cbs actually, but in any event. [ laughter ] thats all right. Thank you. My, i wonder how much that little mistake will cost me [ laughter ] its an honor to be here. My wife and i feel very strongly about any small thing, and they are small things that were able to do to try and support the work of this institution and i think yours too, alice, it strikes me that both of these museums have taken on the task of viva phiing memories in a way that make them alive in our lives and makes their importance something to something that we can touch, that we can hold, that can motivate the rest of us and give our children for that matter a sense of direction and purpose and understand that we that we have spring sprung out of events that we struggle to understand and yet want to live lives that bring that understanding into the sense of purpose that we can bring them. So thank you. Were here with sara and alice, let me couple of housekeeping notes. Each of you received a note card when you may have entered here this evening, sort of the end of the discussion ushers will fan out and well collect your cards so you might have them ready as soon as you can and for those who are watching from home, you can submit your questions using i guess thats powerofmemory thats on twitter, it looks like a twitter address. And were in the u. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, of course, tonight but our studio and digital audience may not have been to the 9 11 museum in new york. And, alice, i understand you have a tour to give us of that. Well, were going to show you a little bit of foot footage taken by drone in the museum, so you get a sense of what its like to fly through, which youll never be able to do, but. Loft. [ laughter ] we can show that. I just want to say what you dont see in this footage are the core exhibitions. The reason being we were not going to put a drone inside small spagss with windy pathways, it would have been much too dangerous for the artifacts but youll be seeing some of those images later on. You worked here at the Holocaust Memorial and museum for over 20 years. What are some of the lessons that you take from this place that you have brought to new york . There were several. On the practical side of things, you know, i had the extraordinary privilege of joining this project in the mid 1980s. Sara and i were both here at that time, and i was part of a design team for what would become the permanent exhibition. But i was able to stay on through the opening of the museum and then to its early years of operation. So i had a kind of a front row seat on how you move from planning and concept to implementation, opening, and having a working museum. And that was extraordinarily valuable when i came to new york because i knew in effect the stages we were going to go through. But more importantly, i was exposed to i consider him a genius, weinberg, who was the founding director and the man who really produced the core exhibition, the permanent exhibition here. And i internalized by watching him and being part of this process a number of questions, you know, how do you portray explicit content in the public space of a museum . How do you balance comem more operation with the documentation of history in a responsible way . What do you do about children . Underage visitors, what you can show, what cant you show . All of those questions were engrained in me so that when i came to new york, and mind you it was five years after the attacks that we started working on the museum, 2006, the circumstances were different, the history is different, the story were telling is different, but the questions were the same. And i was able to bring those questions to the process of imagining what this museum could. Let me ask the significance of location. Sara, the Holocaust Memorial and museum is obviously located thousands of miles from most of the events that that are memorial liesed and portrayed here. Whats the significance offal this place upon the National Mall . Location, location, location. You know, in had the world of holocaust memory, alices museum is auschwitz for our world, and auschwitz is about that very place and what happened there. We are not we are auschwitz i would say is the holocaust and we are about the significance of the holocaust which is a statement because of the piece of real estate that it sits on. Its a very precious piece of real estate. Its not just in washington, d. C. , but its here on the National Mall. And the architect who designed the museum very much wanted the museum to be in interplay with what is represented on the mall. So here you see in this image the entrance on the 14th street side which is meant to speak to that monumental washington, this is the side that faces most of the smithsonian. And he wanted people to remember that if youre coming from the smithsonian, youve seen a lot of wonderful museums speaking to the most creative, remarkable results of human achievement. This museum is also about human achievement. To bad ends of course, but it is that part of the story of human nature. If you enter the other side of the museum you come off the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial and there you are seeing our month uments to freedom and the arc inspect designed a lot of windows where you can just barely make out. So youre looking through this kind of lens of the holocaust but you see a glimmer of jefferson and washington. And then the last thing i would say is were in the seat of power and we speak about power. And the power of the individual, and the possibility of the abuse of power. This image is showing what you see when you come in from the entrance on what you might call the freedom side, which is a reminder of american values. So i think weve designed the museum to speak to this piece of real estate. Is there some statement, too, this is what i must tell you, what i tell our daughters, that this is this terrible event was also part of American History. This is also part of who we are. Yes. And the exhibition that alice worked on and weinberg who led that effort, that exhibit actually began with the american story, with the american g. I. S, a little bit of history since this is meant to be behind the scenes. We did focus groups before we opened to see what would be the reaction to a holocaust mooe museum on the mall for the very reason you said, scott. And people said, why washington. Yeah. So we looked at groups of people who had lived through world war ii, hadnt lived through world war ii, jews and nonjews and the holocaust was one of those pivotal events in history, something everybody should know about, but why would you build it in Washington People asked. So we designed the architecture and the exhibitions to try to answer that question. So the first part of your museum skperns hearing from that american g. I. Who asks that big question which is, how is it that human beings can do this to one another. And then throughout the exhibition we keep bridging back what america knew and when america knew it. And how did america respond or not. And i have to plug because our 25th anniversarys coming up next year and well be opening an exhibit on america and the nazi threat that deals specifically with this topic. Alice, let me get to you talk a bit about the significance of your museums location. There were a lot of plans in the aftermath when people could dry their eyes and think things through a bit about exactly what should happen to that ground which had been in a sense hallowed and consecrated already. Absolutely. Because we are located at the site of the astros sity, the site one of the locations of the attacks, it is more like being a museum in a battleground, you know, a battlefield. There is a sense of consecration, theres a sense of sacred space. The pools that you saw literally sit within the footprints of the twin towers. Theyre void that was left in the aftermath of the loss of the towers. The museum is below the plaza, the plaza is our roof and you go down seven stories, you go down 70 feet what we call bedrock and you are in the cavity of the foundation of the World Trade Center. So the sense that you are in the place where this happened is very palpable. Its alaska accentuated by the palpable presence of the elements of original Institute Structure that remains. Youre looking at the slurry wall on the left which was built when the trade center was first nund construction in the 60s to keep the water out. The river was right there where are there was no battery park city, there was no world financial center, there was water, they had to keep the water out. So the slurry wall encases the foundation of the World Trade Center, and youre very conscious of this archeology, this urban archeology when youre in the museum. In many respects, you know, most museums are places that hows artifacts. Were a museum literally housed within an artifact and you never lose sight of that sense, the power of place, the authentic envelope that youre in is constantly referenced as you move through the museum and i think it intensifies the emotion of the experience. How do you make a place at the same time for recognizing what happened in pennsylvania and just a few miles from here at the pentagon . Absolutely. We are the 9 11 Memorial Museum, so in our historical exhibition we cover all of the sites of the attacks, not just the World Trade Center, the twin towers. We have a display on the pentagon, flight 77 and the flight 93 story of course. So that is all part of the narrative and we commemorate all of the fikts victims of the attacks, 2,977 people, people on all four planes at all three locations, two towers in new york, and we also commemorate the six People Killed in it 1993 World Trade Center bombing because they also died at this site. Sara, lets begin this next question i have with you, but also enlist you ton, alice. Each of you have had to deal with have had to deal, forgive me, thats exactly not how i should put it. Have been able to enrich what youve done because of the accounts of survivors and Family Members of people who were most immediately affected. How did you account for what they have to say . How did you account for what must sometimes be their sensitivities at the same time . What role did they play in shaping what youve done here . Well, let me just start by saying something about alices museum because before even alice worked there, when they after the attacks, they fairly quickly had a group of brought some some advisers to ask about how to memorialize this or creating a museum and i was one of many people who was asked about it. Having lived through this experience my answer was its too soon, its too soon because we opened 48 years after the event and i think you opened 13 years. Yeah. 13 years after the event. So, you know, the i could just knowing what we had been through imagine who it would be like for the families and the sur viefrsz, and the process what they would need from it would be so hard and 0 comp indicate and they couldnt wait. They had to go forward and i understand that. We had the luxury of some distance in time so that the survivors were at a different point in their life and they could reflect back on it, but it wasnt the recent, allconsuming part of their thinking about it. We had a committee, we had a committee of survivors and historians and probably not enough educators but we should have had some educators talk about the storyline. People participated together. I would say, you know, there were some issues about that. One one experience i remember having may be eight months before the museum was opened a survivor who was very involved in the creation came up to me and said very sweetly, well the exhibit text is going to be in english and yiddish, right . And i said, well, you know, it will be about the yiddish people and the culture and the identity in very many ways, but our audience wont be speaking and reading english yiddish. And i said, think of our audience, we used to always say, think of the farmer from iowa, thats the person we want to come here and introduce the holocaust and let them think was important. Alice, i can get you to talk about the people who survived that day, the Family Members of people who were lost that day, a lot of Organization Even before you came into the picture. Absolutely. You know, it was contentious, theres no way to get around that. You know, had you all of the rou emotion that saras talking about, which say consequence of trying to crystallize a story that is so fresh and so raw for people. But there were two parts to our project. There was the creation of the memorial and Family Members were invited. This memorial has the names around the two pools. And the names are not alphabetical, theyre not organized alphabetically, theyre organized by where you were and the context of that day for you. So if you were on one of the planes, if you were on flight 170 dmooif was hi jacked and crashed into tower 2, the name of those victims would be on the south pool, the pool which is located where tower 2 was. But families were invited actually to make requests to create what were called add jay sensesies, meaningful add jay sensesies. Where if theyre loved one was kroes to someone at work, a colleague or was a relative of someone at work or in some cases, and this was really quite astonishing, met the person that the family wanted their name to be next to on the day of 9 11 in the process of trying to escape or evacuate. They were asked and invited to tell us who they wanted. And we were able, we got 1200 requests for add jay sense sies and we were able to actually honor all of them. So that was one way that families of victims were deeply invested in the process. For the museum, you know, the core of the commemorative part of the museum is all the names and faces of those who were killed, nearly 3,000 people. And we went to the families and invited them to submit the portraits that were most meaningful to them. They were invite and submit doan donate mem bealya, personal effects of their loved ones that could be shared in this exhibition, which you can see here. So there was that level of engagement. But, you know, when you have nearly 3,000 people die, expa nin siously close Family Members number about 10 to to 12,000 people and theres no way to engage all of the families in a close par tis paer to, you know, activity in terms of creating the museum, so we worked with representatives. We have nine Family Members open the board of directors. We had a board subcommittee like your committee, sara, that was the Program Content Oversight Committee and the 2 cochairs were both Family Members. We had a Museum Planning conversation series where we brought a group of people together and we thought together and imagined together what this museum could be and then wed come back periodically over a period of eight wreerz to test our ideas and to test our designs and hear from people. We did that with representatives of not just the Family Members, but the other constituents, all of whom had their own sense of what this museum should be. You had first responders, you had survivors, you had rescue and recovery workers, Lower Manhattan residents and business owners, landmark preservationists. We had a large group of people who felt very vested in the outcome of this project sowomen gauged them and we listened. Are there times when the Memorial Mission and the Educational Mission dont exactly run along the same lines . Yes. I have some stories to tell about that that alice remembers well. And in the way the other story is about that. One say picture i think we have a display of hair, the photograph. So in the process of creating the museum, our designers traveled the world and they went to auschwitz. And if any of you have been there were you know that you see in the barracks of auschwitz rooms, this just doesnt do it justice but full of womens hair that are was shaved from the victims and meant t