ABSTRACT
The Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust exhibition opened in June 2000 to general acclaim in the media. Subsequently the exhibition, like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, has proved immensely successful in generating visitors and it appears to have elicited positive instant responses from them. The response was firmly that the Imperial War Museum could not become a museum of ethnography. It is possible and indeed likely that Holocaust representation that focuses on the 'there' carried out by foreigners will add further ammunition to those who argue for British exceptionalism in a world of many racisms. Furthermore it continues to present the victims as exotic 'others' with little past and certainly no future. Denying its past tradition of immigration, it was hard if not impossible for Britain, in contrast to America, to imagine those liberated from Belsen as future citizens. Indeed, only one or two thousand survivors at most were allowed entry to Britain after the war.
