The Holocaust Experience

Last updated
The Holocaust Experience
Directed byOeke Hoogendijk
Release date
  • 2003 (2003)
Running time
50 minutes
Language English

The Holocaust Experience is a 2003 documentary by Oeke Hoogendijk that takes a serious, slightly critical, look at Holocaust museums around the globe. The film asks where the line between remembering the genocide and exploiting the dead lies and if it's already been crossed.

Contents

Summary

Putting Holocaust victims' hair on display became a controversial exhibit for the United States Holocaust Museum, when survivors protested that the display would be an exploitation of those who had died. The Holocaust Experience looks at this and other moral questions surrounding what has become an industry of remembrance.

Sixty years after the Holocaust, survivors are dying and concentration camp infrastructure is beginning to decay. Deliberate efforts must be made in order to preserve the past. Few would argue the importance of remembering; but is there something wrong with learning about the Holocaust through blockbuster films, or with hopping off a tour bus, in fanny pack and sunscreen, into a concentration camp?

The Holocaust Experience moves between the noisy, hyper-realistic Holocaust museums in America and the decaying ruins of Auschwitz to quietly critique the role of both as proper memorials. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., animated tour guides give rehearsed speeches that try to both shock and entertain their groups, while in Poland, tourists arrive at Auschwitz on buses with "Kraków Tours" painted on the side, and pose for pictures at the entrance gate, below the notorious sign reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free).

Auschwitz was once the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, where 1.1 million people were murdered. But sixty years have passed since the world learned of the genocide that took place there, and now the documentary's camera captures icy, poetic shots of beautiful young girls jogging around the camp, little boys playing soccer nearby, and a woman hanging up her laundry to dry right next to its fence. Earth that was stained with the blood of over a million people is now casually trod on every day.

The truth is, survivors agree, if you did not live through the Holocaust, you will never know their fear, and never fully understand the horrors. "I try to paint a picture that will stir them up, get them thinking," a survivor who serves as a tour guide says, "but I never expect the audience to understand what it was like."

See also

Other Holocaust Documentaries:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romani Holocaust</span> Genocide against Romani in Europe

The Romani Holocaust or the Romani genocide was the planned effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies and collaborators to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against European Roma and Sinti peoples during the Holocaust era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</span> Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust</span> Evidence for the genocide of Jews in World War II

The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.

This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holocaust Memorial Day (UK)</span> National event in the United Kingdom

Holocaust Memorial Day is a national commemoration day in the United Kingdom dedicated to the remembrance of the Jews and others who suffered in the Holocaust, under Nazi persecution. It was first held in January 2001 and has been on the same date every year since. The chosen date is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Union in 1945, the date also chosen for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and some other national Holocaust Memorial Days.

A Holocaust memorial day or Holocaust remembrance day is an annual observance to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews and of millions of other Holocaust victims by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Many countries, primarily in Europe, have designated national dates of commemoration. In 2005, the United Nations instituted an international observance, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gedenkdienst</span>

Gedenkdienst is the concept of facing and taking responsibility for the darkest chapters of one's own country's history while ideally being financially supported by one's own country's government to do so.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holocaust Memorial Center</span> Holocaust museum in the United States

The Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, near Detroit, is Michigan's largest Holocaust museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montreal Holocaust Museum</span> Holocaust history museum in Quebec, Canada

The Montreal Holocaust Museum is a museum located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is dedicated to educating people of all ages and backgrounds about the Holocaust, while sensitizing the public to the universal perils of antisemitism, racism, hate and indifference. Through the museum, its commemorative programs and educational initiatives, it aims to promote respect for diversity and the sanctity of human life. The Museum was founded in 1979 as the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and is Canada's first and only recognized Holocaust museum.

The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Czesława Kwoka</span> Holocaust victim (1928–1943)

Czesława Kwoka was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of the thousands of minor child and teen victims of German World War II war crimes against ethnic Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Holocaust Remembrance Day</span> International memorial day on 27 January for the victims of Nazi genocides

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Brasse</span> Polish photographer

Wilhelm Brasse was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work were the subject of the 2005 Polish television documentary film The Portraitist (Portrecista), which first aired in the Proud to Present series on the Polish TVP1 on 1 January 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust</span> Period of commemoration in the United States

The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH) is an annual eight-day period designated by the United States Congress for civic commemorations and special educational programs that help citizens remember and draw lessons from the Holocaust. The annual DRVH period normally begins on the Sunday before the Israeli observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and continues through the following Sunday, usually in April or May. A National Civic Commemoration is held in Washington, D.C., with state, city, and local ceremonies and programs held in most of the fifty states, and on U.S. military ships and stations around the world. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum designates a theme for each year's programs, and provides materials to help support remembrance efforts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holocaust tourism</span> Tourism around destinations associated with The Holocaust

Holocaust tourism is tourism to destinations connected with the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust in World War II, including visits to sites of Jewish martyrology such as former Nazi death camps and concentration camps turned into state museums. It belongs to a category of the so-called 'roots tourism' usually across parts of Central Europe, or, more generally, the Western-style dark tourism to sites of death and disaster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margit Feldman</span> Hungarian-American public speaker (1929–2020)

Margit Buchhalter Feldman was a Hungarian-American public speaker, educator, activist, and Holocaust survivor. Feldman and her family were placed in a concentration camp in 1944, where her parents were killed immediately. She survived her incarceration after lying about her age, resulting in her being placed in a work camp. She was freed from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945. After moving to the United States, she raised a family and became a public speaker, sharing her experience with students until her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Never again</span> Phrase associated with the Holocaust and other genocides

"Never again" is a phrase or slogan which is associated with the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides. The slogan was used by liberated prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp to express anti-fascist sentiment. It was popularized by far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane in his 1971 book, Never Again! A Program for Survival. The exact meaning of the phrase is debated, including whether it should be used as a particularistic command to avert a second Holocaust of Jews or whether it is a universalist injunction to prevent all forms of genocide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rochelle Saidel</span> Jewish-American writer

Rochelle G. Saidel is an American writer and researcher. She founded the Remember the Women Institute in 1997 and currently serves as its executive director.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renée Firestone</span> Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor, educator and fashion designer

Renée Firestone is a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and educator, who became known for her fashion designs in the 1960s after she immigrated to the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Mosberg</span> Holocaust survivor (1926–2022)

Edward Mosberg was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, educator, and philanthropist. During the Holocaust, he was held by the Nazis from 14 years of age in Kraków Ghetto, Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, Auschwitz concentration camp, Mauthausen concentration camp, and a slave labor camp in Linz, Austria, that was liberated by the US Army in 1945. Nearly all of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.

References