Re the following message:
>I was just reading Andrea Dworkin's article "The Unremembered:  Searching
>for Women at the Holocaust Memorial Museum" in the most recent Ms. magazine.
> She believes that Jewish women are somewhat invisible in this exhibit, and
>particularly notes that although many tortures and abuses are documented,
>sexual abuse/bodily invasion of women in the camps is absent.  I have not
>yet seen this exhibit, but am interested in whether this is a fair
>assessment of this exhibit.
>
>Cheryl Musch
>Oakland, CA
 
I attended an AAM meeting in Philadephia this summer that dealt with
"interpreting cultural diversity " in museums.  One of the session
presenters was a designer who had worked with the Holocaust museum to plan
the museum's exhibitions.  His presentation went through the background of
each exhibit;  he discussed how the design teams had built life-sized
models of  each potential exhibit and asked various survivor groups to
critique the exhibits and offer suggestions on whether or not to
show/exhibit/discuss certain aspects of the holocaust.
 
As I recall, one potential exhibit was to show a pile of women's  hair --
locks of hair, braids, etc. --- that somehow the museum had been able to
obtain (I gathered that the hair had actually been obtained from one of the
camps).  The women survivors who saw the planned display asked that this
hair *not* be displayed --- some members of this group said that of all the
things that they had experienced,  the loss of their hair was one of the
most dehumanizing aspects of their experience.  So, the museum honored
their request and dealt with the hair issue in another way -- I haven't
seen the museum, so I don't know what they actually did.  And, I don't know
how large the reviewing group was and so on.
 
The point was that the museum, in this case, decided that the best way to
be "sensitive"  was to respect the wishes of individual women who had
actually experienced the horror of the camps.
 
 I hope my recollection of the designer's presentation is more-or-less
correct (and apologies to the Holocaust Museum if I misrepresented
anything).  I do recall that, for the museum, the original impulse was to
*show* the hair, knowing how powerful such a display would be, and that
they decided instead to honor the request of the survivors *not* to have it
on display.  Perhaps other issues surrounding the "sexual/bodily abuse"
question were dealt with similarly.  My hat's off to the Holocaust Museum
for trying to be  "sensitive", "inclusive", "powerful", "truthful", etc.,
when dealing with issues that are very personal, emotional, and painful.
 
Carol McDavid
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