Month: May 2007

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USHMM hosts educational seminar

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is holding a seminar this week for United Nations information personnel. The series is designed to promote the idea that public outreach and education can prevent future genocides.

At a groundbreaking seminar at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., participants will examine topics as diverse as the genesis of famous anti-Semitic texts and genocide in the Internet era.

The seminar, “The History of the Holocaust: Confronting Hatred, Preventing Genocide and Cultivating Moral Responsibility,” is the result of a new partnership between the museum and the UN Department of Public Information (DPI).

Information Officers from UN Information Centres in Paraguay, Colombia, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil and the United States are taking part to support educational initiatives on the Holocaust by Member States, mandated in a 2005 General Assembly resolution.

They are exploring how intolerance can lead to the breakdown of democratic values and, in its extreme form, turn into mass killing, according to DPI’s outreach division.

It’s good to see USHMM creating programs for the UN, but I can’t help but wonder if it woudn’t be more affective if the actual UN representatives and their staff were attending.

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Record keeping

As a librarian with a Holocaust organization, I wind up receiving a fair number of inquiries about raw facts that are often easily answered by current events. For example, this weekend I was forwarded a message from a patron who was asking if the 6 million victims reported for the Holocaust referred only to Jewish victims, and how it was possible to be so precise about the number.

Naturally, I told her that it’s impossible to be completely precise about the total but explained that we believe the number of Jewish victims to be between 5.6 and 6.3 million because the Nazis were meticulous record keepers (and many records were duplicated in various locations). In fact, it’s that record keeping that has been at the forefront of Holocaust discussions for the last six months, as the archives in Bad Arolsen continues to flit through the spotlight.

If the Nazis had been a little less bureaucratic we would have wound up with the same kind of situation we’re seeing in Darfur, where the number of deaths are (by necessity) an estimate. I went on to recommend a number of sources to her and commented that if she wanted a nice snapshot of the technocracy behind the Third Reich, she should check out IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black.

When I finished answering her email, I found myself wondering if this isn’t one of the reasons we’re less invested in other genocides. The Holocaust wasn’t the first act of genocide — and as we’ve seen in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, Timor, and Cambodia — it certainly isn’t going to be the last, but the level of documentation was certainly beyond what we’ve seen before or since.

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6 million flickr project

6 Million People

Please help us remember the Holocaust dutifully and respectfully by adding your self-portrait, or a photo of a person you love, to our pool. Add as many photos as you want, but please submit no more than 1 picture of any person, so that in the end we will have close to 6 million pictures of people, with a different person the subject of each picture. It’s going to take a long time to add up to 6 million pictures—that’s 200,000 Flickr pages with 30 images each—but our goal is 6 years or less. When we complete the project, it will be a memorial to those who died, and will provide us a with a way to visualize all those people. Thank you for helping and supporting us in our goal.