ABSTRACT
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum talks of 'victims'/'survivors' and 'liberators'. In Washington, DC, local concerns are – in part – reflected in the conscious adoption of a focus upon the events which tie America to the Holocaust. The history of American indifference to Jewish fate features throughout the Permanent Exhibition. The redemptive closure offered by liberation and post-war emigration from the scene of the murders, surrounds the narrative of the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It provides the beginning of our descent into the history of destruction, and provides the end of our ascent out of that history. There is a sense in which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is essentially established as an un-American museum, telling the story of an un-American crime to Americans. Like Auschwitz, these museums-cum-memorials have become sites of both Holocaust tourism and Holocaust pilgrimage.
