Week 8:Knowledge

I finally started my internship! It's been a long couple of months, but the wait was worth it. This internship and the USHMM is everything I hoped for and more. This week we have been going through training and orientation, where we were told what our actual jobs are going to entail and given briefs about different departments in the Museum and how they all work together with visitor services. Our main jobs include seven tasks: Passes, ticketing, groups, rover, closing, coat check, and elevator talks. However, we also aid in informing the public about other resources and exhibits the Museum has to offer besides just the main primary exhibit. The primary exhibit is a self-guided chronological tour that starts on the fourth floor and works its way down to the second. The fourth floor exhibits Nazi persecution, the third floor the Final Solution, and finishes with liberation and resistance on the second floor.

USHMM has so many other exhibits and resources that it offers though, besides just the primary exhibit- including a temporary They Were Neighbors exhibit, a Cambodia exhibit, and a face to face video opportunity to talk with a Syrian refugee in real time. This week we were given a tour of both the exhibits, and the new knowledge I have been acquiring is astonishing. I personally didn't know anything about the Cambodian Genocide, yet was completely floored by it. Over two million civilians died in the course of four years, which compared to the Holocaust doesn't seem like many casualties. However, the Holocaust and World War II went on from 1939-1945 and spanned across most of Eastern and Western Europe. Cambodia is a small country in Asia where two million equaled 1/4 of the entire population. This is just the basic knowledge they introduced us too, so I can't imagine how much and what else I will learn in the next three months. Another training we underwent was working with the virtual reality section of the From Memory to Action exhibit. The Museum actually offers a 360-degree virtual reality experience that tells the story of a Syrian refugee and his son. The father narrates the story and the setting constantly changes from his refuge home, to his town that was destroyed, to an overview of Syria, to refugee markets, and so many other places that one can hear, see and feel as if they are there with him. It was my first time test running virtual reality and it is extremely disorienting, where I almost fell of my chair a few times.

This week I was also able to listen to one of over sixty Holocaust survivors partnered with USHMM. The interns and I received a private facilitation with Marty, a Czech survivor of Auschwitz and Mauthausen who lost his parents and six of his eight siblings. His story is one of miracles, as blind luck saved him from death more than once. He spoke about how one day him and some other inmates were forced to dig tunnels when an explosion went off in the tunnel he was working on, yet he was outside going to the bathroom while it happened. Seventy people died in that tunnel and he was the only survivor of the work group. This is just one miracle he received during his time imprisoned.

We lastly got to go on a tour of the architecture of the Museum, so if any visitors ask about the design or layout we can provide them with a clear answer. A few fun facts about the Museum include the architect James Ingo Freed who went to the camps in Poland to get inspiration for the layout and design of the four buildings of the Museum, the Hall of Remembrance which is a six sided building representing the six sides of a Jewish star, and a stream of lights on the floor of the Hall of Witnesses which has a gap in the middle. One interpretation is that this line of lights represents a timeline where the lights missing include the years 1933-1945, where mankind is said to have perished. The lights continue after 1945 when humanity returns to the world. Below are a few pictures of some of the architectural points I mentioned, including a model of the Museum and the gap in the lighting.

This week was the end of our training and so starting next Wednesday, I will be a fully independent intern working alongside an amazing and encouraging staff inside a memorable and monumental memorial of those who've lost their lives to genocide.