A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, promote human dignity, and prevent genocide. A public-private partnership, federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanence, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by donors nationwide.
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Fritzie Fritzshall
There’s no way to explain, and it will not go away. One of the hardest things for me to this day, is to talk about this ride in this boxcar. The boxcar they loaded us onto, they had to push us in. And the door locked. There is no food and no water. Babies are crying. Mothers are crying. And the babies are dying from lack of food and lack of air. Your own grandfather dies in this compartment going to Auschwitz concentration camp with you.
Stefan Kucharek
Kucharek: The track went in that direction.
Question: You just delivered?
Kucharek: I just brought the cars and the Jews were unloaded. I took the cars and that’s it...end of story.
Sara Bloomfield
Every single day we are losing some aspect of the authentic voice of the Holocaust, whether it’s the loss of the survivors, the other eyewitnesses, or the deterioration of the material, every single day.
Fred Zeidman
There’s been a tremendous, tremendous growth in Holocaust denial, while survivors are here to tell the story. What happens when they are gone? There has got to be tangible evidence that this happened.
Klaus Mueller
If you think that in archives materials are always well kept, you’re wrong. Paper deteriorates, there is water damage.
Sara Bloomfield
We are in a race against time every single day.
Klaus Mueller
We work at the state archive in Berlin. We inventoried and safeguarded the one and only documentation of a Nazi court from 1933 to 1945. Seven million pages. That is one of many projects we are working on in Germany but also in Europe. And our goal is to make materials available that have never been available for researchers. All the collections that we are bringing to Washington give us a new and much deeper knowledge of the Holocaust, and this is really our core mission.
Sara Bloomfield
Last year we reached over 24 million people, and most of them are not walking through our doors. Hate lives today on the Internet, and we are reaching people all over the world on the Internet where our problems are globalized and so are our opportunities.
Elie Wiesel
He who hates one group hates all groups. He who hates one minority hates all minorities. Wherever and whenever a project even close to similar to that project that Hitler had for the Jews and some other people, we must immediately do whatever we can to stop it.
Sara Bloomfield
The world we live in today calls for being bold.
Madeleine K. Albright
I am very grateful to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Academy of Diplomacy and U.S. Institute of Peace, because I think it is a very interesting and important combination of talents.
Richard H. Solomon
One of the objectives of the Genocide Prevention Task Force is to get the prevention of mass violence, mass atrocities, and genocide on the president’s own agenda. The most hoped-for result of the Task Force is more preventive action.
Fred Zeidman
We have extraordinary partnerships all over the world. Today’s technology has truly enabled us to reach the entire world instantaneously.
Michael Graham
Our newest project is called World Is Witness. We try to profile both stories of courage and stories of reality and try to find that balance between helping people to understand what they can do but also reminding us all of what’s really happening.
Fritzie Fritzshall
We wonder today why did someone not stand up, why did our community not stand up? We were their neighbors. How could they turn their heads on us? How could they turn their hearts so hard that they didn’t see and they didn’t care?
Sheila Polk
I have taken ethics courses for 26 years now as a prosecutor and have never been touched or impacted in the way that the lessons of the Holocaust impacted me. The program begins with the Nazi rise to power and chronicles the role of law enforcement and prosecutors and now judges in allowing the Holocaust to happen. By the time I had finished the course I went from believing that the Holocaust had nothing to do with me and my role as Yavapai county attorney, to knowing that the Holocaust has everything to do with my role as county attorney, with my role as a prosecutor. And with me as a person. By the time I flew out of Washington D.C. the next day and made it back to Prescott, Arizona, I was already thinking that I want all the prosecutors in Arizona to have the advantage of this course.
Rebecca Dupas
One of the greatest lessons of the Museum is not to be a bystander. That when you see things going wrong it is your duty to speak out in some capacity to stop that type of injustice.
Fred Zeidman
It’ll happen again and again and again unless the rest of us stop it.
Sara Bloomfield
We must push ourselves constantly to be bigger than we think we can be.
Michael Graham
We have such a powerful opportunity at the Museum to make a difference. If we don’t do it, no one else will.
Fritzie Fritzshall
There’s no way to explain, and it will not go away. One of the hardest things for me to this day, is to talk about this ride in this boxcar. The boxcar they loaded us onto, they had to push us in. And the door locked. There is no food and no water. Babies are crying. Mothers are crying. And the babies are dying from lack of food and lack of air. Your own grandfather dies in this compartment going to Auschwitz concentration camp with you.
Stefan Kucharek
Kucharek: The track went in that direction.
Question: You just delivered?
Kucharek: I just brought the cars and the Jews were unloaded. I took the cars and that’s it...end of story.
Sara Bloomfield
Every single day we are losing some aspect of the authentic voice of the Holocaust, whether it’s the loss of the survivors, the other eyewitnesses, or the deterioration of the material, every single day.
Fred Zeidman
There’s been a tremendous, tremendous growth in Holocaust denial, while survivors are here to tell the story. What happens when they are gone? There has got to be tangible evidence that this happened.
Klaus Mueller
If you think that in archives materials are always well kept, you’re wrong. Paper deteriorates, there is water damage.
Sara Bloomfield
We are in a race against time every single day.
Klaus Mueller
We work at the state archive in Berlin. We inventoried and safeguarded the one and only documentation of a Nazi court from 1933 to 1945. Seven million pages. That is one of many projects we are working on in Germany but also in Europe. And our goal is to make materials available that have never been available for researchers. All the collections that we are bringing to Washington give us a new and much deeper knowledge of the Holocaust, and this is really our core mission.
Sara Bloomfield
Last year we reached over 24 million people, and most of them are not walking through our doors. Hate lives today on the Internet, and we are reaching people all over the world on the Internet where our problems are globalized and so are our opportunities.
Elie Wiesel
He who hates one group hates all groups. He who hates one minority hates all minorities. Wherever and whenever a project even close to similar to that project that Hitler had for the Jews and some other people, we must immediately do whatever we can to stop it.
Sara Bloomfield
The world we live in today calls for being bold.
Madeleine K. Albright
I am very grateful to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Academy of Diplomacy and U.S. Institute of Peace, because I think it is a very interesting and important combination of talents.
Richard H. Solomon
One of the objectives of the Genocide Prevention Task Force is to get the prevention of mass violence, mass atrocities, and genocide on the president’s own agenda. The most hoped-for result of the Task Force is more preventive action.
Fred Zeidman
We have extraordinary partnerships all over the world. Today’s technology has truly enabled us to reach the entire world instantaneously.
Michael Graham
Our newest project is called World Is Witness. We try to profile both stories of courage and stories of reality and try to find that balance between helping people to understand what they can do but also reminding us all of what’s really happening.
Fritzie Fritzshall
We wonder today why did someone not stand up, why did our community not stand up? We were their neighbors. How could they turn their heads on us? How could they turn their hearts so hard that they didn’t see and they didn’t care?
Sheila Polk
I have taken ethics courses for 26 years now as a prosecutor and have never been touched or impacted in the way that the lessons of the Holocaust impacted me. The program begins with the Nazi rise to power and chronicles the role of law enforcement and prosecutors and now judges in allowing the Holocaust to happen. By the time I had finished the course I went from believing that the Holocaust had nothing to do with me and my role as Yavapai county attorney, to knowing that the Holocaust has everything to do with my role as county attorney, with my role as a prosecutor. And with me as a person. By the time I flew out of Washington D.C. the next day and made it back to Prescott, Arizona, I was already thinking that I want all the prosecutors in Arizona to have the advantage of this course.
Rebecca Dupas
One of the greatest lessons of the Museum is not to be a bystander. That when you see things going wrong it is your duty to speak out in some capacity to stop that type of injustice.
Fred Zeidman
It’ll happen again and again and again unless the rest of us stop it.
Sara Bloomfield
We must push ourselves constantly to be bigger than we think we can be.
Michael Graham
We have such a powerful opportunity at the Museum to make a difference. If we don’t do it, no one else will.
Located among our national monuments to freedom on the National Mall, the Museum provides a powerful lesson in the fragility of freedom, the myth of progress, the need for vigilance in preserving democratic values. With unique power and authenticity, the Museum teaches millions of people each year about the dangers of unchecked hatred and the need to prevent genocide. And we encourage them to act, cultivating a sense of moral responsibility among our citizens so that they will respond to the monumental challenges that confront our world. Today we face an alarming rise in Holocaust denial and antisemitism—even in the very lands where the Holocaust happened—as well as genocide and threats of genocide in other parts of the world. All of this when we are soon approaching a time when Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses will no longer be alive.
The Museum works closely with many key segments of society who will affect the future of our nation. Professionals from the fields of law enforcement, the judiciary and the military, as well as diplomacy, medicine, education and religion study the Holocaust, with emphasis on the role of their particular professions and the implications for their own responsibilities. These programs intensify their sense of commitment to the core values of their fields and their roles in the protection of individuals and society.
In addition to its leadership training programs, the Museum sponsors on-site and traveling exhibitions, educational outreach, Web site, campus outreach and Holocaust commemorations, including the nation’s annual observance in the U.S. Capitol. Our Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies works to ensure the continued growth and vitality of the field of Holocaust studies. As a living memorial to the Holocaust, we work to prevent genocide in the future through our Academy for Genocide Prevention which trains foreign policy professionals. Working with Holocaust survivors and an array of organizations, the Museum is a leader in galvanizing attention to the crisis in Sudan.
Since its dedication in 1993, the Museum has welcomed nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million school children and 85 heads of state. Today 90 percent of the Museum’s visitors are not Jewish, and our Web site, the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust, had 25 million visits in 2008 from an average of 100 different countries daily. With hundreds of thousands of online visitors from countries with majority Muslim populations, translating our Web site into Arabic and Farsi is a top priority; already, portions are available in more than 20 languages. For more information, please visit www.ushmm.org.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2126
Main telephone: (202) 488-0400
TTY: (202) 488-0406
Information about visiting the Museum.
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