Have you visited the Museum of Jewish Heritage − A Living Memorial to the Holocaust?

My plan for coming days is to visit The Museum of Jewish Heritage, located in Lower Manhattan, with the express purpose of viewing their exhibition of the life and work of novelist Irene Nemirovsky, who perished in Auschwitz in 1942. Nemirovsky authored numerous books in her lifetime, but the one that first caught my attention is Suite Francaise, published posthumously, the reason behind recent renewed interest in the author.  Living so near to the museum, the Nemirovksy exhibit provides ample reason for an immediate visit, as do various events and exhibitions offered in coming months.

What astounds a reader of Suite Francaise is the direct manner in which Nemirovsky represents the violence and hypocrisy of the French occupation by Germany, as if writing from the benefit of hindsight; which we know she did not do.  I am interested to learn more in depth details about this woman, who managed to preserve her manuscripts as if aware that their survival would be her legacy to history.  This is the significance of a museum such as the Museum of Jewish Heritage–it makes life a history of the present day, by which we can position ourselves in the shoes of the many women and men who, like Nemirovsky, have personal histories otherwise untold, but without which the truth of the history of their total experiences would never be complete.  We are reminded that human beings lived and then died; their physical lives were destroyed, sometimes alongside testimonies to the atrocities committed toward them.  

Nonetheless, some stories are preserved through survivors, diaries, and in Nemirovsky’s case, in a small valise as if a tomb awaiting discovery beneath more than sixty years of sand.  The museum is the site of such discoveries for many visitors and rightly bears some responsibility for the representation of the memories of its subjects.  The Holocaust occurred not so long ago that its memory is lost; rather, its memory is still alive in the remaining survivors and structures of the devastation of the Nazis.  

Another exhibit at the museum, “The Mass Shootings of Jews in the Ukraine, 1941-1944: The Holocaust by Bullets,” appears to exemplify this idea through recollections and photographs documenting the executions.  This is an event of which I have read very little, and the exhibit suggests to be highly informative, perhaps shockingly so.  Therefore, I will probably read up on the topic some before attending the exhibit, and hopefully will be prepared to fully digest the realities of its images and artifacts.

The tone of the museum does not appear to relate only to Jewish heritage, but denotes the need for our own society to face various levels of involvement, as well as reconciliation with the fact that the events of the Holocaust are not merely history, but an integral component of the psychology and history of all peoples involved.  What the museum appears to expose is the need for the recognition of the very connectivity of the world today, and the necessary involvement of museums in the process of that recognition.  I certainly will visit soon.