United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The permanent exhibition of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum presents a narrative history of the Holocaust through architecture, historical artifacts, photographs, film footage, and eyewitness testimony.
The exhibition begins on the top floor with a statement printed on the wall: “In 1933, there were more than nine million Jews living in continental Europe. Within a dozen years, two-thirds of them would be dead.”
This tour will focus primarily on the work of museum curators and researchers as they prepared to bring the museum into being and will follow the path of the permanent exhibition. From the rise of Nazi power and the evolution of Nazi policy to the stories of loss and liberation. The tour will pause at significant moments in the exhibition, and consider the emotional impact of ghettoization and transports. This is a very personal tour, led by a museum professional who is also a child of survivors; it includes primary-source artifacts and images, oral testimonies, and newspaper headlines from Europe and the U. S. that show how events were portrayed in other countries.
Visitors are encouraged to watch the live testimonies of survivors in the exhibition theater after the tour is over, or spend some quiet moments of contemplation in the six-sided Hall of Remembrance.
General Information
- Meet your Smithsonian Associates Rep inside the museum's visitor entrance, no later than listed start time.
- While there is metered street parking and several parking lots and garages near the museum, space is limited, your best bet is using METRO.
