WHAT THE FAKE?!

(HOW TO TRIVIALIZE TRAUMATIC HISTORY AND TRAUMATIZE YOUR AUDIENCE AT THE SAME TIME.)

In coming to Poland to visit sites of Nazi atrocity, I’ve tried to keep an open mind around my expectations. But there was something I never expected to see.

“Where are we?” A train station, attempting to flee the impending attack. But it’s too late. Three steps forward and we’re surrounded by falling, crashing bombs, darkness, smashing glass, screaming. As we turn the corner, Nazi flags block our path. We weave between them and find ourselves on a street. Uneven cobblestones, a tram. We walk into what looks like a courtroom. A Nazi officer’s hat rests on a podium; behind us, a stranger puts it on. Suddenly there are Swastikas covering the floor. As we step on them, triumphant German music blasts on loudspeakers above—a celebration. After boarding the tram, we arrive at St. Michael’s Prison. At this point, we’re frightened to move on. The bottom of the dark stairwell is out of sight but, compelled to climb down, we discover a dark doorway. Behind the locked door, we hear terrifying sounds—coughing, shouting, screaming. It’s not real, we tell ourselves. Running back up the stairs, we find ourselves in the ghetto, weaving through shadows of dark and narrow alleyways, Jewish faces staring out at us. We look through windows of crowded apartments at white figures, ghosts, paused in sadness, illness. Each step is more frightening. Then sunlight, blinding us—this is a quarry, white stones cover the ground, we look at frozen prisoners in the distance through the barbed wire fence. We are standing in Płaszów Concentration Camp, a site of Nazi brutality and mass-murder...

This is the fairly new exhibition “Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945” at the actual site of the Schindler Factory (where Oskar Schindler employed Polish Jews and succeeded in saving the lives of over 1,000 people).

We had expected an exhibition focusing on Schindler’s story. Instead, we experienced a twisted theme-park ride. A Holocaust House of Horrors. Genocide at Disneyland. We cringed and gasped and recoiled; not at the often vague historical content, but at the designers’ irresponsible decisions.

When I teach about the design of Holocaust museums, I usually share with students a working theory I have: Holocaust museums in the U.S. are more likely to sensationalize history through immersive environments and simulations than museums in the U.K., Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. The elevators at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. resemble the interior of the Nazi gas chambers. The floor and walls of a room at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center mimic the killing fields and mass-graves of the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazis’ mobile shooting squads). The Virginia Holocaust Museum warns on its website, “Guests should wear appropriate attire to crawl through an exhibit.”

Through my work, I warn against such designs because...

1. Trying to recreate the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors trivializes the actual events and real stories of the Nazi era. We’ll never know what it felt like to suffocate inside a gas chamber. We’ll never know what it felt like to starve in a ghetto before being deported in an over-crowded rail car to an unknown destination. We can never understand, so why try?

2. These kinds of simulated environments can be traumatizing for adults, let alone 12-year-olds. I’ve witnessed engaged groups of teenagers walk through these kinds of spaces only to become shocked and silenced and unable to discuss essential questions about history and human behavior. The intellectual purpose of Holocaust education is stifled by careless emotional manipulation.

3. Many young people already understand suffering. Many live in poverty. Some are refugees or children of refugees from war torn countries. Many are bullied at school, or abused at home. Some are survivors of rape. Many are depressed, many self-harm, some are thinking about suicide. When we teach about genocide and human suffering, we need to remember that a teenager may already be trying to cope with her or his own trauma.

4. These experiential, literal designs are filled with fake artifacts, fake streets, fake ghetto walls, fake sounds, fake barbed fences, even fake documents. Next to these fake objects, designers display real artifacts. But, because so much of these environments are make-believe, the authenticity of the real artifacts is called into question. In the face of Holocaust and genocide denial, this is a serious problem.

But still these immersive exhibitions are created. And it looks like this phenomenon isn’t limited to the U.S.; Fake artifacts and fake experiences have found their way onto the actual sites of Holocaust history.

After walking through the Kraków museum’s exhibition, we met with a member of its design team. We asked her about the immersive design. They visited museums in the U.S. and copied their approaches, she explained. “We had to use some simplifications,” she told us. “The museum world is changing. To get young people involved, you can’t use traditional methods.” Those were her exact words.

Have museum designers lost faith in young people? Do museum professionals perceive teenagers as incapable of having respectful, complex conversations about prejudice and hate and social responsibility?

Immersive design within Holocaust education seems to be spreading—and getting worse. Museums are spending millions to manipulate and patronize and traumatize their visitors, and to simplify and sensationalize and trivialize history. We have to challenge and change this.