The Holocaust museum is an incredible experience, but if you go, be prepared to be a little shaken up for the rest of the day.
The first time I went, I was unprepared for what I would see, what it would be like. The second time I went, I spent an equal amount of time watching the crowd’s reation as I did looking at the exhibits.
You should get your tickets in the morning-- you can’t just walk on in. Go at about nine AM and get a ticket for a later tour time. If you wait until past noon, the tickets might all be gone.
After you hand over your ticket, you’re given the passport of a Holocaust victim with the story of what happened to them inside. You climb onto an elevator for the ride up to the first exhibit floor. (The museum is designed like a chimney and its confusing, winding layout is intentional.)
As I rode up in the elevator both times, the folks inside were chatting quietly, laughing softly. After the doors opened, that noise was cut off as if by an axe. They were stunned. The first thing you see is a giant, horrible mural of a ditch full of rotting bodies. It’s meant to represent the American soldiers who found the camps and the shock they felt at the first sight of hell on earth.
As you go through, you will see thousands and thousands of artifacts beginning from the time before the Holocaust when there was a systematic effort to dehumanize and degrade Jews through books, film and even childrens’ texts. You see the slow, horrifying build up and then the life in the camps. (Including a cannister of Zyklon B tablets.) You see a pile of shoes that were seized from the people before they went into the gas chambers and stockpiled for re-use. (Seeing those shoes is hideously personalizing. Individual taste in styles, stains inside where a foot sweated against the leather . . .) You walk through a glass tunnel carved with hundreds of names-- each is a town of village completly wiped from the map by the Nazi campaign. You will see, and be able to enter, a boxcar which transported those poor people to their doom.
Both times I’ve gone, I’ve wept. Both times I went, I spent the rest of the day thinking about man’s inhumanity toward man. I’m glad I went but it’s incredibly emotional.
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It’s a very well-designed museum. The exhibits are visually stimulating and well laid-out. (The floorplan spirals you upwards like a puff of smoke.) The interpretive information is clear, concise and detailed. In other words, they know when just a word or two conveys the enormity of the horror more than a paragraph would. The interractive exhibits can be unsettling in their ability to bring you into the experience. The flow is never interrupted, but the way the exhibits are presented constantly changes. (You don’t just see an endless bank of cases, in other words.)
Just as a museum itself, I would give it a solid 10 rating. In some ways, I like it better than the Smithsonian.
From the visitor perspective, I say that it’s one of my favorites. I know it’s odd to say that, considering the subject matter, but no museum has ever moved me the way that this one did.
The difference lies a lot in the design of the whole structure. Many museums are crammed into buildings designed for another purpose. This one was designed to be an experience.
The facade of the building is looming and oppressive with a vague industrial feel. Inside, the walls are smooth white marble, cold and hard-looking. Nothing relieves the starkness. Once you take the elevator to the first exhibit floor, you’re instantly slammed with the sight of what all this really boils down to-- death and horror. Sometimes, it’s easy to distance yourself from events which happened in the past, but this museum doesn’t allow that.
I’d like to find the best place to park, even if it means parking then taking the Metro (?) into the city. Does it cost to park, and how in the world do I find someplace to park in a situation like that?