This week, the ribbon was cut in front of the newly-renovated St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. The permanent exhibition begins with a question on the wall: What was the Holocaust?
Helen Turner is the museum’s director of education. She took KMOX’s Carol Daniel on a tour through the exhibit, and told her the exhibit’s goal is to help visitors understand how the Holocaust happened.
“The Holocaust is a Jewish centric story. 6 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered, but they weren't the only victims,” Turner said. “And so we're really making sure people understand the gravity and the magnitude of the Holocaust.”
Turner took Carol Daniel to a space called “The geography of mass murder.” She said its purpose is to dispel some preconceived notions about the Holocaust, including that Auschwitz was the only, or largest, camp. But there were other ways that Jewish people were targeted and killed, she explained.
“A lot of the killing took place in different sites. So beginning with the ghettos, but then also transitioning into mass murder,” she said. “And this is called the Holocaust by bullets with people being shot into mass graves, often within walking distance of their homes. This is being witnessed by local people, often being assisted by collaborators. And it's estimated that between 1.5 and 2 million people were murdered that way.”
Turner also talked through the camp system — transit camps, labor camps, concentration camps, and killing centers.
“When people think ‘Holocaust,’ they think camps and they think gas chambers. And we're really trying to shift that narrative to include killing sites,” she said. “Which is where people were murdered in broad daylight, the ghettos where people were starved, and you know, full of that, you know, exposed to disease and brutality, and all the different layers that went into this. It wasn't just camp, right? And this is really important to the narrative.”
Hear more about the Holocaust Museum’s new permanent exhibition and what misconceptions many people have about the Holocaust:
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