David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center

Dina Brookmyer

Thirty-five miles away from the crowds and bustle of the National Mall in downtown Washington, D.C. — or what would ordinarily be the late Baronial crowds during a normal summertime — at the end of a placidity road in Bowie, Maryland, sits a giant conservation facility that is maintaining and safeguarding America's historical memory of the Holocaust. The secure facility belongs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The final couple miles of the drive to the facility, officially called the David and Fela Shapell Family unit Collections, Conservation and Research Center, take yous by nondescript role plazas and hotels, all of which looked by and large abased — a consequence of COVID-19's impact on the economy — on a recent Friday afternoon. The final turn toward the Shapell Center, as museum staff phone call information technology, leads visitors to a narrow route surrounded by brilliant light-green copse. (The Shapell Center sits beyond from a nature preserve; in March, earlier the center's 40 employees were sent home indefinitely, they would see turtles and deer outside their windows as spring emerged.)

If, amid the idyllic surroundings, you briefly forget where you're going — a 103,000-square-foot facility home to millions of written pages, objects, films, artworks and other artifacts from the Holocaust — you lot'll be reminded when two security guards emerge from a berth on the edge of the property, whose perimeter is entirely surrounded by a alpine debate and security cameras. I guard will check your ID, while the other will lead a flop-sniffing dog effectually your car. The building'due south address is non posted publicly; individuals cannot visit without limited permission.

Inside the Shapell Center of the U.South. Holocaust Memorial Museum

"This is the foundation, the eye and soul of everything we do," Sara J. Bloomfield, the U.Due south. Holocaust Memorial Museum's manager, explained before leading Jewish Insider on an sectional tour of the facility. She said the extensive security measures had not been prompted past whatever specific threat, though the memory of a 2009 white supremacist attack that killed a security guard at the museum in Washington, D.C., still sits heavy with her. "If we lost this," she explains, gesturing effectually, "we've lost everything." She added, "If we lost the [museum] edifice, we could rebuild a edifice. This you can't rebuild."

And so what really happens in the remote building that Bloomfield calls the "crown jewels" of the U.South. Holocaust Memorial Museum? "It in itself is a memorial. It'south the evidence of the criminal offence," she said.

When Congress passed a bill in 1980 creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the original program did not involve a massive drove of historical artifacts. The just goal was to create an exhibition space — a large museum, free to the public, in downtown Washington. It took 13 years to finally open the museum, and in those early years, "they were but trying to get the museum opened," Bloomfield recalled. (Bloomfield joined the museum staff in 1986 and became director in 1999.) But it soon became clear that Holocaust survivors, World State of war Two veterans, and many others would proceed approaching the museum with artifact donations. "Nosotros decided, nosotros are America'due south national memorial. We should accept America'south national collection. And then nosotros began aggressively building it."

Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Dina Brookmyer)

The Washington museum and its security costs are funded by federal dollars, which account for just over half of the museum's upkeep. The residuum comes from private donations to fund educational outreach, scholarships and the collections. The Shapell Center opened in 2017 following a $50 million fundraising entrada, office of the museum'south current $1 billion capital entrada.

To demonstrate why the work of specialists at the Shapell Center is and then critical to the museum's mission, Bloomfield and Rebecca Boehling — director of the museum'southward National Establish for Holocaust Documentation — showcased the meticulous processes that guarantee every item that arrives at the museum, down to fifty-fifty a single-folio of a faded handwritten letter, is carefully preserved, documented and digitized.

Because the Shapell Center staff are even so working remotely, the museum has largely stopped shipments during the pandemic. But i object that arrived recently is a large tabletop radio that was discovered in an attic in Hungary. The radio had belonged to Emil Wiesmeyer, the wartime possessor of the printing press that printed the passports that Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg then gave to tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, ultimately saving many lives. Wiesmeyer used the radio to illicitly listen to news reports from the BBC.

A radio that belonged to Emil Wiesmayer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conservation facility. (Dina Brookmyer)

"When we get something similar this, we presume a legal and moral obligation to business firm it, to care for it and ensure its longevity as much every bit we tin can," Bloomfield said. "Everything is in some land of deterioration."

The museum's renowned conservation department works to reinforce and strengthen artifacts, a unlike process than the restoration art museums practise after acquiring a painting or a sculpture. "If you had a Picasso, yous would restore it to try to go it back to where Picasso had it. We want the history of the object to testify," Bloomfield explained.

The employees tasked with preserving these artifacts take unparalleled expertise, the event of years of specialized training in advanced degree programs. "Conservators specialize in areas like paper [or] textiles," said Boehling, a historian who taught for decades at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County before joining the museum last year.

Within the conservation lab, Boehling pointed out a case filled with the shoes of Jewish prisoners who had been murdered at the death camp Majdanek — amongst the museum's best-known, and most haunting, artifacts. "Just imagine the stories when you look at these heels, or that petty ballet slipper," she observed.

Shoes laid out for conservation work (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Upwardly close, away from the huge pile of shoes that sits behind a display case at the museum in D.C., information technology was like shooting fish in a barrel to see how each shoe had decayed. Every few months, the shoes that are on display must be rotated out to undergo routine conservation piece of work. The museum's collection includes 5,000 shoes, on loan from the Smooth government.

A huge, industrial white room serves as secure storage for thousands of objects, sorted past material: textile, ceramic, metal and more. Every detail was planned and approved by conservation experts. In the outcome of a fire, a special sprinkler system would provide just enough water to extinguish the blaze without causing too much harm to the artifacts. The cases are fabricated out of material that does not cause any chemic interaction with the object, and they are raised off the ground and so that, in the case of a inundation, h2o would not seep into them and damage the contents. Each individual case is fix to a different temperature, with custom humidity levels and lighting. The cases are padlocked, along with the drawers and compartments inside. I drawer featured exquisitely preserved stars that Jews had sewn onto their coats, with the familiar German 'jude' besides as the French 'juif' and the Dutch 'jood.' Another housed a delicate wedding dress, fabricated from a parachute, that was worn by dozens of women in a wave of weddings at a displaced persons camp after the war.

A hearse from a Jewish funeral habitation in eastern Europe, the second-largest object in the museum'south collection. (Dina Brookmyer)

Unlike State of israel's Yad Vashem, which limits its collection to items related to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has a broader approach to collecting. "We similar to say they have the biggest, [but] we have the most comprehensive in terms of its variety," Bloomfield said.

The U.S. museum's scope includes "anything that can tell the whole story of the Holocaust from all the different perspectives," Bloomfield said. The museum is currently focused on collecting in Europe, looking for things "that can explain why Germans either found Nazism appealing or were able to rationalize why they were going to get along with it, even if they didn't vote for the Nazi Party or didn't even believe in its antisemitic credo."

Although the Shapell Center opened in 2017, many staff members only permanently started working there there in Jan, with a new shuttle ferrying people between Bowie and the museum in Washington twice a day. A reading room at the Shapell Eye was supposed to open to researchers this twelvemonth. But even as the coronavirus pandemic has forced the museum to alter its plans, the Shapell Center has connected to accept antiquity donations — more than 100 of them — since March, as people stuck at habitation started to sort through one-time photographs or letters in their attics and basements. Still, the donations can't exist shipped to the Shapell Center until information technology reopens.

In many cases, the story of how the museum caused an artifact is virtually as fascinating as the object itself. In February, the museum received a donation that information technology called the Sobibor Perpetrator Collection, after the Sobibor death military camp. A photo anthology created by the camp'south deputy commander, Johann Niemann, showed photos of his life at the fourth dimension. But they weren't photos of killings. "These are pictures of the guards' and the SS men'due south lives in the campsite, and when they would go along outings," Boehling said. "This was an outing they took with their wives and girlfriends to Berlin from Sobibor," she explained. "Look at them partying!"

A page from the Sobibor Perpetrator Collection (Dina Brookmyer)

Niemann was killed in the Sobibor Uprising of 1943, and recently historians wondered if he had living relatives who kept any documentation of his time at the camp. Researchers learned that Niemann'southward grandson was raised past his mother and grandmother in the aforementioned house where Niemann had lived. The grandson has an intellectual inability, Boehling said, "which I mention for this reason: If he had been alive at a different time with his granddaddy, his grandpa would have probably either sent him to his death or force-sterilized him," she said, referring to Nazi policies that persecuted people with disabilities. When Niemann'south grandson learned what his grandfather had done in the state of war, he was "appalled," according to Boehling.

Afterwards speaking with the historians, the grandson gave them the photograph album, which had been stored for decades under Niemann's kitchen sink. In February, a curator with the museum carried information technology aboard a airplane from Europe to the U.S.

Patches worn by French Jews during the Holocaust. (Dina Brookmyer)

A like photo anthology, documenting Nazis at Auschwitz, came to the museum via a human living in Virginia, who wrote to the museum saying that he had photos from Auschwitz. Collectors initially dismissed his letter, bold he was actually referring to a different concentration army camp — because Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets, very few Americans have whatsoever documentation of the campsite, whereas many soldiers accept photos from concentration camps like Dachau that were liberated past U.S. troops.

But the man was insistent, and he eventually sent in the photo album. He was right — information technology was Auschwitz, and several of the photographs showed the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the just known photos of him at Auschwitz. The donor never revealed how he got the album, so the museum assumed "he was probably the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA," Bloomfield said. The museum eventually published a book virtually the photograph album.

A diary decorated past a Hungarian Jewish slave laborer at a Buchenwald subcamp with pigment scraps taken from the floor of an armaments factory. The diary's owner did not survive; the item was given to the museum by a boyfriend prisoner at Buchenwald. (Dina Brookmyer)

With the museum yet closed, and the Shapell Center's reading room not yet open, the museum has — similar everyone and everything else — amped up its digital programming. In 2019, the museum's Facebook Live programming had 700,000 total views. This year, that number has already surpassed iii million. The museum has focused on digitization in recent years, so researchers can notwithstanding access much of the museum'south collection online, allowing scholarship well-nigh the Holocaust to continue. "Imagine if COVID had happened 10 years agone," before the museum'south large push button to become documents online, Bloomfield said. "So much more of the earth is available digitally now."

Digital education is no replacement for the powerful experience of visiting the museum. Merely even every bit the museum remains closed, the millions of artifacts collected by its staff and housed in the Shapell Center serve every bit a perpetual refutation to people who deny that the Holocaust happened, or question facts virtually it.

For several years, the museum has been working on a project to document all the sites of incarceration in Nazi Europe, from a unmarried jail prison cell at a Gestapo prison all the manner to Auschwitz. They've documented more than than 42,000 sites then far. "All these Europeans who said, 'Well I never saw anything, I never heard anything,' it's a fiddling hard to claim that at present. That'southward kind of the same feeling I get when I'm in a place similar this," Bloomfield said of the facility. "In that location'south so much prove."

(Disclosure: The writer's father, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), serves on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the museum's board. He had no involvement with this article.)

One of thousands of papers sent to the museum's facility for documenting and safekeeping. (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

An original carbon copy of the Stroop Written report, a study from a Nazi soldier at the Warsaw ghetto, sent to his supervisors after the Warsaw ghetto uprising had been crushed (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Shoes existence transported for conservation work (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Caps worn past inmates (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Compatible worn by an Austrian Catholic inmate in a army camp (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

A wedding wearing apparel made out of a parachute that was worn by dozens of brides during wedding ceremony ceremonies held at a displaced persons camp subsequently the war (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

An detail that has been processed and stored in the metals section of the museum's facility (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Storage room at the museum's facility (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

A storage room in the museum'due south facility (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

Cleaning materials used to restore items donated to the museum (Credit: Dina Brookmyer)

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Source: https://jewishinsider.com/2020/08/hidden-facility-safeguarding-holocaust-artifacts/

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