Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
displays the largest collection of Victoria Crosses in the world. However, this is much
more than a medal gallery as touch-screen computers tell the moving stories behind
the decorations.
The Holocaust Exhibition
Many people come to the Imperial War Museum specifically to see the Holocaust
Exhibition (not recommended for under-14s), which you enter from the third floor.
Taking a fairly conventional, sober approach to the subject, the museum has made a
valiant attempt to avoid depicting the victims of the Holocaust as nameless masses, by
focusing on individual cases, and interspersing the archive footage with eyewitness
accounts from contemporary survivors.
The exhibition pulls few punches, bluntly stating that the pope failed to denounce
the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws , that writers such as Eliot and Kipling expressed
anti-Semitic views, and that at the 1938 Evian Conference, the European powers
refused to accept any more Jewish refugees. Despite the restrictions of space, there are
sections on the extermination of the gypsies, Nazi euthanasia, pre-Holocaust Yiddish
culture and the persecution of the Slavs. The genocide , which began with the
Einsatzgruppen and ended with the gas chambers, is catalogued in painstaking detail,
while the problem of “proving” the Final Solution is also addressed, in a room that
emphasizes the complexity of the Nazi bureaucracy, which, allied to an ideology of
extermination, made the Holocaust not just possible but inevitable.
The centrepiece of the museum is a vast, all-white, scale model of (what is, in fact,
only a very small slice of ) Auschwitz-Birkenau , showing what happened to the two
thousand Hungarian Jews who arrived at the camp from the town of Beregovo in May
1944. The significance of this transport is that, uniquely, photographs taken by the SS,
of the selection process meted out on these particular arrivals managed to survive the
war. In the alcoves overlooking the model, which has a pile of discarded possessions
from the camps as its backdrop, survivors describe their first impressions of Auschwitz.
This section is especially harrowing, and it's as well to leave yourself enough time to
listen to the reflections of camp survivors at the end, as they attempt to come to terms
with the past.
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