The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States
in Washington, D.C., memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Designed by architect James Ingo Freed and intended to ensure that the era’s horrors are not forgotten, it opened in 1993. Using a stark, harsh architectural vocabulary of industrial forms and unadorned materials, the building itself serves as an oppressive structural reminder of the period of the Holocaust. The museum’s permanent collection uses environments such as a boxcar and a barracks and hundreds of artifacts such as shoes, eyeglasses, suitcases, and concentration camp uniforms and insignia, as well as thousands of photographs, recorded oral histories, and documentary films, to follow the Holocaust’s stages of isolation, deportation, and extermination. In presentations at once lively and grim, the museum immerses viewers in the lives and fates of victims. Exhibits concentrate on the 6 million slaughtered European Jews, but also include materials relating to the Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped, political and religious dissidents, and others who were murdered. Memorable and harrowing, the museum has become one of the most visited in the capital.
