Richmond Renaissance – Day Three

On day three of our Richmond adventures, I decided to check out the Virginia Holocaust Museum. It can be hard to work up the enthusiasm to view a museum about the Holocaust. It is such a depressing topic. However, based on my experience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, these museums are also often an interesting source of art and architecture and there is inspiration to be found among the sadness.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum could be added to the list of Richmond’s Smithsonian-like museums. Admission is free and the museum is very well done. There is ample free parking right near the museum.

The museum is housed in a vintage warehouse building and the exterior looks a little foreboding. There is barbed wire fencing in the parking lot and a cage around the entrance with skull and crossbones.

The first part of our tour was to view a short film interviewing Virginia survivors of the Holocaust. At the end of the film, there is a poignant interview where survivors indicate that the way they made sense of what happened and found the courage to live their lives is to serve humanity by ensuring that an event like the Holocaust never happens again. An important part of this work is to remind people what happened and how it happened.

The museum itself is organized in a winding path that you follow either with a headset or printed guide. Either as an environmentally-friendly choice or as an atmospheric design choice, the museum uses motion-triggered lighting. So, as you first look at the exhibit path, it is completely dark. The lights only come on as you enter an area and you have no idea whether you are going to see something benign, like a reconstruction of a Jewish home during the Holocaust or something horrifying, like mannequins stuffed into bunks the way they would have been in a concentration camp. As you are standing in one area viewing the exhibits, all around you it is dark. It was a bit like going through a haunted house.

One thing I was shocked to learn is that in Lithuania, not only were the Jews rounded up into ghettos, their pets were slaughtered, with the fur used for soldier’s gloves and the pet meat fed to the Jews. What a cruel torture to be forced to eat your beloved pet! It is hard to imagine the depravity that would even come up with such an idea.

There was a raw and bitter pain that permeated this museum. The design wants you to feel on a very personal level how awful the Holocaust was. You crawl into a hiding hole and walk into a reconstruction of a gas chamber. There is no sugar-coating of what happened. The museum is generally designed for those in middle school and older.

When I went through the Holocaust museum in Washington, I was haunted by a letter in one of the exhibits from Adolf Hitler to President Roosevelt that basically said that if the U.S. wanted all the Jews in Europe, the U.S. could arrange to bring them to the U.S. but if the U.S. didn’t want them, other actions would be taken. Likewise, in the Virginia Holocaust Museum, there is the story of the St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews that sailed to Cuba in 1939. Cuba denied them entrance and the ship sailed to Miami, where the U.S. also denied them entrance. The passengers were returned to Europe where most perished in the Holocaust. The Nazis used this incident to illustrate that nobody in the world wanted the Jews. On a more positive note, however, the Thalheimer family in Virginia fought to arrange the immigration for 21 Jewish students to a farm in Burkeville, Virginia in 1939. Nearly all of these students then volunteered for the war effort and served in combat and linguistic roles. Putting all this information together, it is sad to realize that there might have been an alternative ending to World War II. Might the U.S. have accepted the immigration of all these Jews? Might Jews then have fought the Nazis on behalf of the U.S. rather than perishing in the Holocaust? Might our country have benefited from the many skilled and entrepreneurial Jews who were slaughtered? We will never know.

Another theme of the Virginia Holocaust Museum is the importance of the legal system in safeguarding rights for all people. The museum notes that early in the Holocaust, one of the first actions by the Nazis was to revoke the law licenses of all practicing Jewish attorneys. The last section of the museum provides a reproduction of the courtroom from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, including video footage. I watched fascinated as Nazi war criminals debated semantics about whether they were creating a “final” solution or a “total” solution. This would have been a wonderful place to come visit as a law student.

Sobered by this experience, my son and I left to pick up my daughter from camp.

We ate lunch under a wonderful picnic shelter at Byrd Park. This was a second time in our adventures when geese would find us (and this turned out to be a recurring theme). We watched as the geese traveled from the hill above our picnic table to the pond below. They looked hungry as we passed but I told my daughter not to open the lunchbox until they passed and the geese left us alone after they saw we had nothing to offer.

It was very hot and well over 100 degrees that day but the shaded cover of the picnic table made a huge difference. Naturally, just as we were settling in to enjoy our lunch, my daughter announced that she had to go to the bathroom! This is one of the most difficult challenges in our homeless-like situation. I asked a nearby park employee where we could go and he referred us to the Nature Center about 3 blocks away or a somewhat closer port-a-potty. We started walking and as we approached the port-a-potty, my daughter told me that she wanted a “real bathroom.” She was willing to hold it to make it to the Nature Center and fortunately she did!

The Nature Center is the entry point to Maymont so we again went with the flow and decided to hang out at Maymont for the afternoon. Maymont was the estate home and gardens of James and Sallie Dooley. When they passed away, they left their estate to the people of Richmond. It is hard to imagine someone owning all of this land as a private residence! The gardens are amazing. There is a Japanese garden complete with stepping stones and wooden bridges and an Italian garden with fountains.

James adored Sallie and was quite the romantic. There is a plaque in the Italian garden where he proposed to Sallie and I believe he also cultivated a rose in her honor.

	We ventured in the heat and hiked back to the car to pick up my daughter from camp. At the pickup, I noticed several very chic moms. They were wearing the sort of fashionable outfits all moms wish they could wear but can’t for practicality or financial reasons. Still, it was fun to see and reminded me of the great quote about Virginia women from the Virginia Historical Society the day before. To the left is my attempt to recreate one mom’s outfit based on clothes found at amazon.com. She was wearing black slingback pumps, slim pants that were printed at the ankle and had a different pattern for the rest of the pants and a black top with cut-out shouders.

On our drive home, we had a small bit of excitement when all of a sudden a “Check Fuel Door” message came on the car display. I tried to look up in the car manual what to do about this (difficult to do while driving on the highway) and all that I could see from my quick glance was a warning about gasoline being highly explosive! We pulled off at the next exit and checked the gas tank. The cap was very loose, so I tightened it up. I then called our local Honda dealer to confirm that it was safe to drive home. They said it was and that all I had to do was wait a few days to let the gas equilibrate and the message will go away by itself. Fortunately they were right. A car maintenance problem would have been a disaster for our summer camp schedule and we were grateful to drive on to another day.