Collecting Hard Histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

Episode 130 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, has host Catherine Cooper talking with Felicia Williamson, Director of Library and Archives at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, about collecting and presenting difficult history.

The episode: "Presenting challenging histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

From a basement to downtown

The museum began in 1984 as a small museum and education center in the basement of the Jewish Community Center in North Dallas. Holocaust survivors in the area — a founding group of 125 — felt the Holocaust was misunderstood or barely known, and wanted a place to teach schoolchildren and the public. Just as important, they wanted somewhere to remember relatives they had lost: in the eighties travel to Eastern Europe was hard, and many did not know where their loved ones had been murdered, so there was no place to visit or grieve. They created a memorial room alongside the museum and education center.

Moving downtown took longer than planned. The new museum opened in 2019 and widened its scope to human and civil rights, on the understanding that the Holocaust was not only a genocide of immense scale but also the point at which human rights first gained some legal recognition and protection. The museum asks what it means to stand up for others and how individuals can make a difference, and it aims to host difficult conversations.

The collections

Long run by volunteers, the museum is now professionally staffed. Williamson oversees:

• a library of about 3,500 volumes;
• an oral history collection begun at the very start, now holding about 200 interviews with North Texas Holocaust survivors — some recorded in the eighties, when survivors were grandparents, and recorded again decades later — and expanding into human and civil rights;
• some 20,000 archival items and artifacts, tied in the exhibit to 12 strands of human and civil rights.

Until she began collecting human and civil rights material in 2018, everything was Holocaust-related: photographs, albums, letters. Now donations can include cellphone video of mass shootings and protest signs, which has changed how and what the museum collects. Holocaust material still arrives — recently a journal kept by a litigator at the Nuremberg trial went on display — as families find what grandparents and great-uncles left.

Trust, multiplied by trauma

Archival work always rests on trust, Williamson said, and trauma multiplies what trust is needed: a donor or interviewee must believe their story will be handled with care. Her background is in Holocaust history, yet in a single day she may prepare for a testimony about Rwanda in the morning and one about escaping the Cambodian genocide in the afternoon, topics nobody could master.

Holocaust survivors are usually more than 75 years from their trauma, and today's survivors were children at the time. Someone caught in a recent mass shooting in Dallas, or a refugee from a recent crisis, is far more likely to be speaking about it for the first time. The museum does a pre-interview to learn the outline of a story, but people reveal more when the recording starts: in one interview a man disclosed something far more traumatic than he had mentioned before, and a session planned for an hour and a half lasted four. Moments like that are powerful and historically important, and impossible to schedule.

Saying less, and letting objects speak

The exhibit must reach visitors from PhD holders to seventh-grade readers, in 16,000 square feet, on some of the hardest subjects there are. Trained to write long papers, Williamson had to unlearn it: museum text should be a paragraph at most, and exhibit copy barely a sentence unless it is gripping. That means cutting most of what you would like to say, simplifying without condescending, and accepting that visitors will carry away only a fraction — because no one can absorb everything.

Artifacts do much of the work. A backpack carried by a child on the Kindertransport is one visitors talk about constantly: children recognize it as something they wear, and parents see a child someone was forced to send away, and understand the fear behind that. An object earns its place only if it helps tell the story; many she loves never make it into the exhibit.

Asking for help

When the museum widened its mission, Williamson cold-called the 9/11 Museum, the people who collected in St. Louis after the protests there, and others who had collected on the front lines of controversy. They were generous, and the lesson held true: it is always about trust, just harder. Collections arrive as a trickle at first and grow once a community trusts you, which takes longer where there is trauma. Holocaust testimony itself surged in the eighties, as survivors retired and thought about grandchildren who should know the history. Her advice to newer professionals: if a history is worth preserving, do the work, solve problems creatively, and never be shy about asking for help.

Sources

Based on the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, Episode 130, "Presenting challenging histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum," produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (public domain); the guest's words are rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.