Why should people who never heard about Jewish life in Macedonia look at this history? What universal message comes from this specific local context.
This Museum is designed for a universal audience. We were deeply aware that there are few Jews in Macedonia and throughout the Balkans. We know Macedonia is unique because this region has known genocide after the Holocaust. The final film has Macedonian Human Rights leaders grappling with the answer to the profound question: What is the meaning of the Holocaust at this moment in time, in this region?
Their answers are multi-layered and complex, yet also simple. “We can do better. We must do better! We remember the past to plead for human dignity and decency, to enlarge the domain of moral responsibility."
“We remember the past to transform the future. We must salvage life from the ashes. The Holocaust must be a warning and not a harbinger of things to come.“
A visitor will walk out of the Museum into the contemporary world which is complex and difficult; where antisemitism and xenophobia are on the rise everywhere. How much context for today can we find in a museum about yesterday?
My design partner Edward Jacobs, the Museum Director Goran Sadikarijo, the Board and I were guided by two commitments: to transmit the history and how to offer that history to a generation of visitors that did not experience it but must learn emotionally moving and morally compelling lessons from it.
We believe the Museum must tell a story with integrity and depth, in a way that makes its viscerally present to its visitors. Sadly, tragically, the story of the Holocaust resonates today in ways that it has not in the decades since it happened. By not preaching or propagandizing to the audience, we leave them room to apply what they have seen to the world today. We can give hundreds of parallel examples. Perhaps two will suffice.:
By understanding how the Nazis came into power, the visitor earns an appreciation of the precariousness of democracy, and how precious it is. They see the importance of respect for human rights and dignity and should be able to recognize the dangers of polarization and political violence and—and if the lessons did take hold, - work to prevent it.
From the exhibition on Bulgarian occupation, the visitor learns how citizenship is an essential protection of all rights yet on the other hand, the visitor comes to understand the perils of a society closing itself off—by closing one’s borders to those in need of refuge.
I dream that one day we can live in a world where the concluding exhibit in a Holocaust Museum could dismiss the evil that 20th century humanity perpetrated as an aberration, believing that we could not ever behave that way, or be racist in that way, or be xenophobic that way, or be antisemitic that way. But today’s world shows us we can be exactly like them. The difference is that we are not powerless to stand up to injustice. We just have to be willing to act to uphold it.
I dream of living in a world where the Holocaust is irrelevant because we care about each other, because we respect each other’s humanity. We would have nothing to say because we are so much better and think so differently from the people of those terrible days.
Sadly, tragically—shamefully—that is not our world.
Michael Berenbaum