Visitor Survivors in Museums

In my Museum Audience class last semester we each chose an audience to study in order to best facilitate their needs. I chose to study and write about "Visitor-Survivors." I chose this topic after thinking of my own experiences in museums, and of the experiences that affected me the most. The first to come to my mind was the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Oświęcim, Poland.

As a visitor to Oświęcim I found walking through the museum extremely difficult. I saw the execution wall, the torture chambers, the room full of human hair, human skin made into a leather lamp shade and rooms full of shoes, pots and pans, suitcases. Sometimes it was the littlest of things that affected me the most-- like shoe polish. Jews trucked into Auschwitz knew nothing of the terrible destination that lay before them, and some packed shoe polish. Little did they know about the unimportance of shoe polish in a place like Auschwitz.

Confident in studying "visitor-survivors" I looked for articles, news pieces and other forms of written work trying to find a survivor's account of returning to a site of conscience. I found nothing. I also tried working with other museums, like the Newseum's 9/11exhibition and the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but no one was able to describe their experience walking with visitor survivors due to the sensitive nature of these experiences and the desire to keep these emotionally vulnerable moments confidential. So what do you think? As museum educators, some of us may have an experience with a "visitor- survivor." What do you do with a visitor-survivor on your tour? How do you make sure those voices are heard?

#Visitor #Survivor #SitesofConscience #AuschwitzBirkenau #Museum #MSTDSM