El Museo del Holocausto: Shoá

Jenny and I went to El Museo Shoá today just a few blocks from the Callao exit (“Are we on the freeway, Meg?” “Sorry, Jenny, the Callao subte station.”) Jenny, although an avid Holocaust literature reader like myself, had never been to a Holocaust museum. I’ve been the ones in Dallas and Washington, D.C. (both for school.) I thought it would be interesting to see another country’s perspective on the Holocaust. (Especially a country with so many Jews and so many Nazi refugees, if that’s what you’d call war criminals in hiding (i.e. Adolf Eichmann, one of the main executers of Hitler’s “final solution.")) Argentina remained neutral throughout the entire War, thus the flood of Jews before WWII, and the rise of Germans and Italians immigrants after WWII. I had seen an ad in the subte station earlier and decided to add it to my list. I thought a museum was a good on-your-way-to-recovery-from-tonsillitis-and/or-strep-throat activity and invited Jenny to come along.

Once we got to the museum (just three blocks from the subte stop) we found the museum. A small red brick building with a discrete sign and bullet-proof glass behind a metal gate. I would’ve been confused if I hadn’t seen the mezuzah by the door (which I just learned is based on scriptures from Deuteronomy 6:9.) We ring the bell, as is customary for pretty much every door without a guard in Buenos Aires, and a man opens the door only a crack. He questions us, more like grunts at us. “¿Podemos entrar?” I ask him. “¿Documentos?” he asks. I shrug and hand him my passport. He lets us in, writes down my info, and hands us some pamphlets written in English after we pay our ten pesos each. When Jenny hands him her New Mexico driver’s license, he says he doesn’t need it. Apparently I am responsible if she desecrates anything in the museum. Or maybe I just look too Aryan. I think after the 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, people here are a bit cautious. We are the only visitors at the moment, but I see documentation of visitors past.

There were not a lot of artifacts in this museum. A few things here and there, nothing like the museum in DC, with the cattle cars and rooms full of baby shoes. This museum focuses more on images and tries to “dignify, humanize, and restore the victims’ deprived identities.” Jenny and I strolled around and we each lit a prayer candle in the reflection room before we left. We were not allowed to take pictures of the outside of the building (which seems understandable considering Argentina's anti-Semitic past, but also silly, as I learned about the museum from a subte ad) but we took a few inside.

There were all these happy-looking paintings of children in ghettos,
but the written descriptions below them were really sad.

The text in the white box reads: Literatura antisemita y de los Nazis
the books are all written in Spanish

Photographs and testimonies from of survivors
(It's really weird to think my kids may never meet one)

a testimony (translated below)

There is a saying: “Everyone has his own garden.” Instead, I have my own cemetery. In it there are no tombs, in it are the sufferings and horrors that I, and others, have lived through. Time will not avenge my memory, nor will it lessen the pain that has marked me forever.

In November of 1942, the Argentine President authorized the immigration of 1,000 Jewish children to the country. They had been found in Vichy, France. The anti-Semitic press showed their disapproval ("the children will grow and as Jews, they will multiply"), and the children were deported from France and sent to concentration camps instead of living freely in Argentina.

Federal Police Division for the Investigation of Discrimination

Jenny at El Museo del Holocausto

And if you're still interested, for an article on Juan Peron and Nazism, click here. (It's a TIME Magazine article from 1998, but they say history never changes)