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| You are here: 2000 / Other Activities / Task Force for holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research / Presentation by Ms. Suzanne Bardgetts, Imperial War Museum, UK | |||||||||
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Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
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Presentation of Institutions in the field of Holocaust Education in the Task Force Countries Presentation by Ms. Suzanne Bardgetts, Imperial War Museum, UK Presentation by Mr. Hans Westra, Anne Frank House, the Netherlands Task Force Declaration Task Force Briefing Presentation by Ms. Suzanne Bardgetts, Imperial War Museum, UK Bardgett, Suzanne Presentation by Suzanne Bardgetts, Imperial War Museum Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I will start by giving some general background about the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition, and then look at some of the challenges which setting up an exhibition on this subject within an existing institution posed, and how we have overcome them. The Imperial War Museum is Britain’s national museum of twentieth century conflict. It is funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and housed in a rather magnificent building about a mile south of the Houses of Commons on the once unfashionable but now very up-and-coming south side of the River Thames. It was founded in 1917 to commemorate what was then known as The Great War, but has grown with the events of this century. It opened its first Second World War exhibition in 1946, and today covers all conflicts in which British and Commonwealth countries have been involved since 1914. The Museum offers not just exhibitions, but a large archive and research centre too. It has some 15,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures and 50,000 posters; large quantities of documents, both British and foreign; a national reference library of over 300,000 books; enough cine film to keep a viewer occupied for over ten years; over 5 million photographs and photographic negatives and transparencies, some 28,000 hours of recorded oral history reminiscences. As for artefacts, a random selection in descending order of size might include the B29 Superfortress (the type of plane which dropped the bomb in Hiroshima), the Russian T34 tank, submarines, field guns, encoding machines, periscopes, dolls, headscarves, badges, medals.....I asked myself what was our smallest artefact and realised that it was probably Oswald Pohl’s cyanide capsule. So we have an enormous range of three dimensional material as well. The Museum has an important educational purpose and each year sees some 100, 000 school children come to the Museum, usually as part of what in the UK is known as the Year 9 GCSE history studies. For these children we offer a full range of educational activities, including talks, filmshows, drama projects and, for sixth formers, conferences on key topics of twentieth century international history. Demand for these services outstrips supply several times over. The Holocaust Exhibition will be the Museum’s main contribution to Millennium Year. We were fortunate enough to secure a grant of £12.6 million from our national Heritage Lottery Fund in 1996, which, together with generous private funding, has enabled us to complete the third and final stage of our redevelopment programme - the upgrading and extension of the ‘back half’ of the Museum’s rectangular site - and to include within it the two-storey Holocaust Exhibition. The Exhibition came about for a number of reasons. The Holocaust is on the National Curriculum for schools in Britain, and it was felt that a full narrative exhibition on the subject would be a help to the tens of thousands of fourteen year olds who tackle this subject each year. Moreover, the subject seemed a fitting one for the Museum to commemorate the Millennium. Most importantly, however, such an exhibition would plug a large gap in the Museum’s coverage of twentieth century history. In terms of narrative scope it was important that the Exhibition should treat the subject as part of European/ international history, not be seen from a narrowly British angle. At the same time it would be vital to show how Allied policies affected the victims, and to do this we have showcases called ‘News reaches Britain’ which tell the story of how the world found out about the killings and how it reacted - using documents, newspapers and other material. Material for display has been acquired through appeals to survivors in this country, through purchase, and, very importantly, through loans from existing institutions. Many of the organisations from which we are currently fixing up loans of important material are represented here today. We are most grateful for their cooperation. So what are the advantages to establishing a Holocaust Exhibition within an existing national institution? Firstly, the Exhibition has a helpful context in that a good deal of the rest of twentieth century history is told in the adjacent galleries. This helps the visitor gain a rounded and informed picture of the wider story. It is easier, for example, to understand the conditions in which the Nazi Party gained popularity if you know something of the aftermath of the First World War in Germany. The campaign history in Europe and on the Eastern Front gives valuable background for understanding the background against which the Holocaust took place. Second, in organisational terms, the presence of a massive infrastructure of expertise, practices and systems meant that a great deal of support - which would otherwise have had to be built from scratch - was already in place. This clearly makes for important financial savings. A free-standing museum in which all this had to be established anew would clearly be a much more costly scenario. A third advantage - for those concerned to see that understanding of the Holocaust is disseminated widely - is the fact of our having an existing client base. The Museum attracts some 440,000 visitors a year, 1.5 million if you count our three branches. London is of course a key tourist destination for people in many of the countries in which the Holocaust took place. Moreover we have changing exhibition programmes which draw new and expanding audiences. We thus have a strong contingent of regular visitors and avenues to many more. This brings us a particular opportunity in that quite a number of our visitors are probably people who would not normally choose to visit a Holocaust Exhibition, but whom we can persuade to visit while they are in the building - thus helping to educate those who are indifferent - or even sceptical - about the subject. So those are the three main advantages. Now on to some of two challenges we have faced, both of which might well apply in other similar national institutions.. There have of course been many and I could occupy a whole day talking about them. It is early days moreover to judge whether we are through all the difficulties which such a project throws up! The first I will mention is the obvious one of digesting and presenting to the general public one of the most complex and controversial events of our time. It called for an approach which I will call ‘humility in unchartered waters’. There were elements of the history of the Holocaust with which - it is only honest to say - we as an institution were not familiar. We had previously approached the subject from a narrowly British perspective. We had done oral history projects on refugees who came to this country in the 1930s, and a great deal of collecting had been done on the liberation on Belsen (many letters and diaries having come to the Museum from former liberators and relief personnel). Moreover we were familiar with the British official records and how they had been used in accounts of the Allied response to the Holocaust. But there were sizeable areas of the subject where we had very little in the way of collections and where our expertise was lacking too. So we had to plug the gap. We did this through appointing an Advisory Group to guide us on historical, cultural and some practical matters. Two of them - Ben Helfgott and Professor David Cesarani - are present at this conference, and I should like to record the huge debt we owe them - they have been a tremendous source of knowledge and support, as well as being important ambassadors for the project. Second, a major preliminary to the whole project was a series of fact-finding visits which we undertook as a team to other institutions which had established Holocaust-related displays, so that we could gain as wide a knowledge as possible of how others had approached this theme. Many of these were overseas - but some were close to home. I am thinking of Beth Shalom - opened just as our project was beginning and a salutary lesson in what can be achieved by a small multi-talented team. Advice was freely given in all these institutions, and this was invaluable. It was altogether a refreshing experience and caused us to look afresh at many of our existing practices and assumptions. Third, we have made sure that we have shared our plans with other organisations in the UK involved in Holocaust education. The exchange of ideas with these organisations - again the key ones are represented here today - and the planning of joint events with some of them has proven a useful way of testing ideas and working through likely problem areas. The second challenge I would like to mention was the apprehension felt in some quarters at how a Holocaust Exhibition would fit into the rest of the Imperial War Museum. Some people within the Museum expressed concern that it would be so dark and so shocking that it would sit uncomfortably with other displays. Now it has to be said that although much of what is on show at the Museum is of a serious natures, there are exhibitions with a lighter tone too. Would not the Holocaust be just too grim and too awful? Anxiety of a rather different kind came from some people - particularly in the Jewish community - who felt nervous about the Exhibition’s proximity to our displays of military hardware. The Museum has a large display of tanks, aeroplanes, artillery pieces and missiles in its central atrium, and we were sensitive to concern in some quarters at the prospect of an exhibition on genocide being adjacent to this space. Our solution was, first, to ensure that the Exhibition had its own very distinctive ambience within the Museum. We deliberately engaged an architect as part of the design team with the expectation that the exhibition area - which at 1400 square metres is considerable - would have its own special physical character and atmosphere. We are also ensuring that the entrance area and the exit area two powerfully conceived spaces - both dominated by audio-visual installations - work effectively to provide appropriate introductory and closing or ‘decompression’ spaces. This, we hope, will ensure that the Exhibition is properly sealed from other intruding elements, and that people do not experience a jarring effect as they move from it to other parts of the Museum. On convincing uncertain colleagues of the viability of a Holocaust Exhibition, one very useful thing we did was to take them to see another such exhibition ‘ in action’ - in this case the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where we made a Customer Services fact-finding tour last November. It is hard to argue with success, and my colleagues came away with a very clear picture of a Holocaust Exhibition that draws in lots of people and excels as a place of learning and memory. It was a lesson in the importance of internal communication. Of sharing the vision. The Exhibition’s structure and showcases are now in place, and showcases are, as I write, being fitted out with the many hundreds of artefacts, documents, and other historical material chosen by our team to illustrate the story. The Exhibition will be opened by HM The Queen on 6 June. I hope very much that you will come and judge the results of our work for yourselves. There are many issues which I have not touched on this morning. How a national museum confronts the controversies over Britain’s own role in the Holocaust. The ethics of showing shocking or ‘distasteful’ images or material. The academic level at which the narrative texts are pitched. But I hope this has given an insight into some of the questions we have faced, and encouragement to anyone thinking of doing something similar in an existing national institution. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars Closing Session and Declaration Other Activities
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||