I was among the fortunate few with tickets to the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture. I had witnessed the slow rise of this basket-like architectural marvel on the National Mall, and a few weeks before the visit I had watched the dedication of the museum on television, an event deeply reminiscent of the dedication, 23 years earlier, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Then, it was the words of Elie Wiesel and President Clinton that brought tears to my eyes. This time, I fully expected to be equally inspired by Congressman John Lewis and President Obama, and I was not disappointed. I was touched by the less soaring, but heartfelt words of President George W. Bush. The most eloquent and most moving statement at the ceremony, however, may simply have been the embrace of the two presidents, men from opposite ends of the political spectrum and with very different life histories, providing an antidote, perhaps, to an election season filled with venom and hate.
Still, nothing prepared me for the emotional jolt I’d feel upon actually entering the building. I was barely through the glass revolving door and hadn’t seen any artifacts when I felt tears well up in my eyes. To be there, a white man, among hundreds of people, almost all African Americans, some young, some old, some too frail to walk and in wheelchairs pushed by their grandchildren. Some in their traditional Sunday best, and others in dashikis or jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black heroes and political slogans. All there together, to memorialize ancestors and celebrate the history of their people. The experience awakened feelings that I had not experienced since the dedication of the place that holds my memories and honors those responsible for my survival, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I am often asked and have often wondered myself, how it is that I can speak of the murder of my sisters and the death of my father at the hands of Nazis, without betraying any emotion. Why is it that the only time I actually shed tears for the loss of my father was when I stood at the foot of his grave in the Ebensee concentration camp? Was it because as a child growing up among the ruins of the Holocaust, the Holocaust had somehow been imprinted in my DNA? Was it that long before Elie Wiesel gave us permission to speak of and mourn our losses, long before there was a Yom ha-Shoah, long before there was a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, had I been immunized against the horrors of the Holocaust? And why was it, that now, walking along with people of a different color and in a museum that on the surface had nothing to do with me, my immunity finally was giving way to the pain of my own life story?
Yes, three floors down in the museum exhibition, I saw not only African men and women cruelly captured, dehumanized, and turned into commodities, but felt also a father I never knew and my own mother, deported, robbed of their identities, turned into numbers, enslaved, and leased to German industry. And yes, the indescribably cruel child-sized manacles on exhibit brought me face-to-face with the cruel fate of my two sisters killed in Auschwitz, when they were five and seven, in ways that even a visit to Auschwitz had not.
Visitors to the Permanent Exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are taken on a voyage that gradually descends from normal everyday life to the horrors of the “Final Solution.” In contrast, the National Museum of African American History and Culture takes visitors on a hopeful path that slowly rises from the horrors of slavery, to freedom and achievement. Tragically, however, the global disavowal of slavery in the 19th century did not prevent the reinstitution of state-sponsored persecution, enslavement, and murder in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I now look at African American people in a different way than I had before visiting the new museum. Those old people and those kids in dashikis and T-shirts, I now feel are my kin. We are all descendants of people who were enslaved, and we all have a lesson to teach the world, a lesson contained in the simple words, both “Never Again” and “We shall overcome.”
©2017, Alfred Münzer. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.