The Tower Of Shtetl

When most of us walk into a monument, memorial or museum there is something about it which creates a kind of awe that is unprecedented in our own life. For example, I clearly remember the first time I walked into the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC as a child and stood in complete awe of the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln. I was so transfixed that my parents came and grabbed me after having called after me for several minutes while visiting with relatives.

In what Diana and I have been referring to as “day trips,” we visited DC today and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I had ordered tickets a week or so in advance in anticipation of a larger than usual crowd over the holiday weekend. They use tickets (which are free, although tickets.com charges a $1.25 service fee) to make sure that they can control the volume of people going through the permanent exhibit (more on that later).

The exhibit starts on the fourth floor of the museum, to which you are taken on an elevator. With only 7-9 people on each car, they also try to control the volume of people. For us, today, the control didn’t much matter. There were lots of people, and with lots of people in a museum there comes lots of interesting problems.

Ever been in the theater and someone’s cell phone goes off? Ever been in church and someone’s teenager is talking about everything OTHER than the service? Have you ever been watching a program on TV or a movie in the cinema and someone disrupt you? Imagine being in a diorama that includes hundreds (perhaps thousands) of individual exhibit parts which culminate the history that makes up the story which is the purpose of the museum itself. And then imagine people walking in front of what you’re reading, and talking out loud about problems with their boyfriend, and screaming at their children for being noisy and rude – which is noisier and ruder than their own kids!

I’m not big on uncontrolled crowds, but people are just so uncaring and unfeeling. This is THE museum of the 21st century that means more than just memorializing an era of time – its meaning goes far beyond that and into the realm of a continual reminder that what has happened before can NEVER be allowed to happen again. And it is very solemn. A considerable degree of respect is expected. It’s not a place for your cell phone.

Okay, enough grousing.

In one part of the permanent exhibit’s tour there is a “room” in which you enter where all of the walls are covered in portraits, which spans two floors. These portraits are not pictures of people in situations of death and disability. These are pictures and portraits of people through the years whose lives had been touched by the era in which they lived. It is called The Tower of Shtetl. As I looked upon these portraits, most with no labeling or captions whatsoever, it struck me that I was witnessing the history of someone’s family. Years had passed since those pictures had been taken, but for that instant time stood still… and that person was immortalized for eternity. And now their family had a memento of their face, a bit of their personality, and a glimpse into their soul.

What hit me the most is when Diana said that THIS was the reason that what we do for a living is so important to us. I wept. I have never felt more important to so many people as I did at that moment. I enjoy my work so much that I almost never feel like the future of what I’m doing now will make much more of a difference than a beautiful portrait on the wall. But in 100 years or more, people will look at those same portraits and say “that was Uncle so-and-so and his wife and kids.” And it won’t matter anymore who took the picture – but those descendants will have a moment of their life for years to come, and a piece of their personality, and a glimpse into their soul – and I gave it to them.

I’m humbled.

For more information on the museum, which I cannot begin to do justice to here, please go to www.ushmm.org. The permanent exhibit takes 2-3 hours to see properly.

Don’t go on a holiday weekend. 🙂