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Nicole Frechette
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The trip was advertised as a “Day of Remembrance and Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.” As the group of yawn- ing, bleary-eyed travelers met at Logan Airport at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, some suggested that it be renamed, “a very long and full day of remembrance and education.”
On May 9, 33 undergraduate and graduate students from Salem State University, local teachers and members of the public joined professor Christopher Mauriello and Nicole Frechette from the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) for a one-day visit to the USHMM in Washington, D.C. Generous funding from Combined Jewish Philanthropies helped reduce travel costs to make it possible for students and teachers — many of them studying the Holocaust and comparative genocide at the university — to visit the museum for the first time.
The group toured the main exhibit with professional USHMM tour guides. It was not a passive listening tour. At many points, members of the group asked questions of the tour guides regarding why certain artifacts were included or excluded or why some events were only interpreted from a particular position. The questioning and open exchange of ideas continued over lunch in one of the classrooms at the museum during a discussion session with Krista Hegburg from the museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Research.
During the wide-ranging discussion, the group debated issues, including the relative absence of interpretation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and how the U.S. and its response to the Holocaust were represented in the exhibits. After lunch, the group toured the more recent “Some Were Neighbors” temporary exhibit. As someone who has been to the museum numerous times, professor Mauriello was most moved by this exhibit that illustrated how quickly friends, neighbors and fellow Germans turned on their Jewish neighbors in the ideologically charged atmosphere of 1930s Germany. Straight from the museum, we boarded our plane and landed at Logan at 7 pm, exhausted from a long day of remembrance and education.
The one-day group trip to the USHMM is part of the CHGS’s mission to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive among current and future generations, and use the universal lessons from the Holocaust to study comparative genocide and identify and combat racism, intolerance and injustice throughout the world. The trip is part of the center’s annual programming and they are planning to return to the USHMM next spring.
For more information, visit salemstate.edu/chgs or contact Nicole Frechette at nicole. frechette@salemstate.edu or call 978.542.2399.