Transcripts For CSPAN3 Memorial Museums And Memory 20170419

Tonights program is part of a series of conversations that were hosting, examining the power of memory to shape our future. This season were taking time out to think about why we remember the events that led to the holocaust and other global atrocities and how collective understanding can help us make informed decisions about our future and shape a better world. To learn about this Program Series and all the conversations and programs that we host, we hope youll sign up for the museum email and follow us on social media. Some people have questioned why is there a Holocaust Museum on the National Mall . Or how can we fulfill our mission as a living memorial to the past and the victims while still being relevant enough to engage youth today . Im sure similar Big Questions have been asked of the 9 11 museum about your role and your vision, and tonights conversation will examine that and more. In that regard, its important to note that one of our founders ellie ra zel often said this museum is not an answer but a question. We at the museum say the holocaust poses many questions and its our job to never stop asking why. Tonight were joined by sara bloomfield, shes the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial museum and alice greenwald. Shes tsz the president and koechlt. 9 11 memorial and museum in new york. Sara and alice have been good friends and colleagues for more than 30 years and its an honor to welcome you back to the museum tonight, alice. Tonight theyll give us a behindthescenes look into the creation, the design and impact of living memorials and what they hope the future holds for their institutions andal all o us. And now tonights moderator and the the es steemtd host of nprs Weekend Edition saturday and nbc sunday morning, scott simon. Cbs actually, but in any event. [ laughter ] thats all right. Thank you. My, i wonder how much that little mistake will cost me [ laughter ] its an honor to be here. My wife and i feel very strongly about any small thing, and they are small things that were able to do to try and support the work of this institution and i think yours too, alice, it strikes me that both of these museums have taken on the task of viva phiing memories in a way that make them alive in our lives and makes their importance something to something that we can touch, that we can hold, that can motivate the rest of us and give our children for that matter a sense of direction and purpose and understand that we that we have spring sprung out of events that we struggle to understand and yet want to live lives that bring that understanding into the sense of purpose that we can bring them. So thank you. Were here with sara and alice, let me couple of housekeeping notes. Each of you received a note card when you may have entered here this evening, sort of the end of the discussion ushers will fan out and well collect your cards so you might have them ready as soon as you can and for those who are watching from home, you can submit your questions using i guess thats powerofmemory thats on twitter, it looks like a twitter address. And were in the u. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, of course, tonight but our studio and digital audience may not have been to the 9 11 museum in new york. And, alice, i understand you have a tour to give us of that. Well, were going to show you a little bit of foot footage taken by drone in the museum, so you get a sense of what its like to fly through, which youll never be able to do, but. Loft. [ laughter ] we can show that. I just want to say what you dont see in this footage are the core exhibitions. The reason being we were not going to put a drone inside small spagss with windy pathways, it would have been much too dangerous for the artifacts but youll be seeing some of those images later on. You worked here at the Holocaust Memorial and museum for over 20 years. What are some of the lessons that you take from this place that you have brought to new york . There were several. On the practical side of things, you know, i had the extraordinary privilege of joining this project in the mid 1980s. Sara and i were both here at that time, and i was part of a design team for what would become the permanent exhibition. But i was able to stay on through the opening of the museum and then to its early years of operation. So i had a kind of a front row seat on how you move from planning and concept to implementation, opening, and having a working museum. And that was extraordinarily valuable when i came to new york because i knew in effect the stages we were going to go through. But more importantly, i was exposed to i consider him a genius, weinberg, who was the founding director and the man who really produced the core exhibition, the permanent exhibition here. And i internalized by watching him and being part of this process a number of questions, you know, how do you portray explicit content in the public space of a museum . How do you balance comem more operation with the documentation of history in a responsible way . What do you do about children . Underage visitors, what you can show, what cant you show . All of those questions were engrained in me so that when i came to new york, and mind you it was five years after the attacks that we started working on the museum, 2006, the circumstances were different, the history is different, the story were telling is different, but the questions were the same. And i was able to bring those questions to the process of imagining what this museum could. Let me ask the significance of location. Sara, the Holocaust Memorial and museum is obviously located thousands of miles from most of the events that that are memorial liesed and portrayed here. Whats the significance offal this place upon the National Mall . Location, location, location. You know, in had the world of holocaust memory, alices museum is auschwitz for our world, and auschwitz is about that very place and what happened there. We are not we are auschwitz i would say is the holocaust and we are about the significance of the holocaust which is a statement because of the piece of real estate that it sits on. Its a very precious piece of real estate. Its not just in washington, d. C. , but its here on the National Mall. And the architect who designed the museum very much wanted the museum to be in interplay with what is represented on the mall. So here you see in this image the entrance on the 14th street side which is meant to speak to that monumental washington, this is the side that faces most of the smithsonian. And he wanted people to remember that if youre coming from the smithsonian, youve seen a lot of wonderful museums speaking to the most creative, remarkable results of human achievement. This museum is also about human achievement. To bad ends of course, but it is that part of the story of human nature. If you enter the other side of the museum you come off the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial and there you are seeing our month uments to freedom and the arc inspect designed a lot of windows where you can just barely make out. So youre looking through this kind of lens of the holocaust but you see a glimmer of jefferson and washington. And then the last thing i would say is were in the seat of power and we speak about power. And the power of the individual, and the possibility of the abuse of power. This image is showing what you see when you come in from the entrance on what you might call the freedom side, which is a reminder of american values. So i think weve designed the museum to speak to this piece of real estate. Is there some statement, too, this is what i must tell you, what i tell our daughters, that this is this terrible event was also part of American History. This is also part of who we are. Yes. And the exhibition that alice worked on and weinberg who led that effort, that exhibit actually began with the american story, with the american g. I. S, a little bit of history since this is meant to be behind the scenes. We did focus groups before we opened to see what would be the reaction to a holocaust mooe museum on the mall for the very reason you said, scott. And people said, why washington. Yeah. So we looked at groups of people who had lived through world war ii, hadnt lived through world war ii, jews and nonjews and the holocaust was one of those pivotal events in history, something everybody should know about, but why would you build it in Washington People asked. So we designed the architecture and the exhibitions to try to answer that question. So the first part of your museum skperns hearing from that american g. I. Who asks that big question which is, how is it that human beings can do this to one another. And then throughout the exhibition we keep bridging back what america knew and when america knew it. And how did america respond or not. And i have to plug because our 25th anniversarys coming up next year and well be opening an exhibit on america and the nazi threat that deals specifically with this topic. Alice, let me get to you talk a bit about the significance of your museums location. There were a lot of plans in the aftermath when people could dry their eyes and think things through a bit about exactly what should happen to that ground which had been in a sense hallowed and consecrated already. Absolutely. Because we are located at the site of the astros sity, the site one of the locations of the attacks, it is more like being a museum in a battleground, you know, a battlefield. There is a sense of consecration, theres a sense of sacred space. The pools that you saw literally sit within the footprints of the twin towers. Theyre void that was left in the aftermath of the loss of the towers. The museum is below the plaza, the plaza is our roof and you go down seven stories, you go down 70 feet what we call bedrock and you are in the cavity of the foundation of the World Trade Center. So the sense that you are in the place where this happened is very palpable. Its alaska accentuated by the palpable presence of the elements of original Institute Structure that remains. Youre looking at the slurry wall on the left which was built when the trade center was first nund construction in the 60s to keep the water out. The river was right there where are there was no battery park city, there was no world financial center, there was water, they had to keep the water out. So the slurry wall encases the foundation of the World Trade Center, and youre very conscious of this archeology, this urban archeology when youre in the museum. In many respects, you know, most museums are places that hows artifacts. Were a museum literally housed within an artifact and you never lose sight of that sense, the power of place, the authentic envelope that youre in is constantly referenced as you move through the museum and i think it intensifies the emotion of the experience. How do you make a place at the same time for recognizing what happened in pennsylvania and just a few miles from here at the pentagon . Absolutely. We are the 9 11 Memorial Museum, so in our historical exhibition we cover all of the sites of the attacks, not just the World Trade Center, the twin towers. We have a display on the pentagon, flight 77 and the flight 93 story of course. So that is all part of the narrative and we commemorate all of the fikts victims of the attacks, 2,977 people, people on all four planes at all three locations, two towers in new york, and we also commemorate the six People Killed in it 1993 World Trade Center bombing because they also died at this site. Sara, lets begin this next question i have with you, but also enlist you ton, alice. Each of you have had to deal with have had to deal, forgive me, thats exactly not how i should put it. Have been able to enrich what youve done because of the accounts of survivors and Family Members of people who were most immediately affected. How did you account for what they have to say . How did you account for what must sometimes be their sensitivities at the same time . What role did they play in shaping what youve done here . Well, let me just start by saying something about alices museum because before even alice worked there, when they after the attacks, they fairly quickly had a group of brought some some advisers to ask about how to memorialize this or creating a museum and i was one of many people who was asked about it. Having lived through this experience my answer was its too soon, its too soon because we opened 48 years after the event and i think you opened 13 years. Yeah. 13 years after the event. So, you know, the i could just knowing what we had been through imagine who it would be like for the families and the sur viefrsz, and the process what they would need from it would be so hard and 0 comp indicate and they couldnt wait. They had to go forward and i understand that. We had the luxury of some distance in time so that the survivors were at a different point in their life and they could reflect back on it, but it wasnt the recent, allconsuming part of their thinking about it. We had a committee, we had a committee of survivors and historians and probably not enough educators but we should have had some educators talk about the storyline. People participated together. I would say, you know, there were some issues about that. One one experience i remember having may be eight months before the museum was opened a survivor who was very involved in the creation came up to me and said very sweetly, well the exhibit text is going to be in english and yiddish, right . And i said, well, you know, it will be about the yiddish people and the culture and the identity in very many ways, but our audience wont be speaking and reading english yiddish. And i said, think of our audience, we used to always say, think of the farmer from iowa, thats the person we want to come here and introduce the holocaust and let them think was important. Alice, i can get you to talk about the people who survived that day, the Family Members of people who were lost that day, a lot of Organization Even before you came into the picture. Absolutely. You know, it was contentious, theres no way to get around that. You know, had you all of the rou emotion that saras talking about, which say consequence of trying to crystallize a story that is so fresh and so raw for people. But there were two parts to our project. There was the creation of the memorial and Family Members were invited. This memorial has the names around the two pools. And the names are not alphabetical, theyre not organized alphabetically, theyre organized by where you were and the context of that day for you. So if you were on one of the planes, if you were on flight 170 dmooif was hi jacked and crashed into tower 2, the name of those victims would be on the south pool, the pool which is located where tower 2 was. But families were invited actually to make requests to create what were called add jay sensesies, meaningful add jay sensesies. Where if theyre loved one was kroes to someone at work, a colleague or was a relative of someone at work or in some cases, and this was really quite astonishing, met the person that the family wanted their name to be next to on the day of 9 11 in the process of trying to escape or evacuate. They were asked and invited to tell us who they wanted. And we were able, we got 1200 requests for add jay sense sies and we were able to actually honor all of them. So that was one way that families of victims were deeply invested in the process. For the museum, you know, the core of the commemorative part of the museum is all the names and faces of those who were killed, nearly 3,000 people. And we went to the families and invited them to submit the portraits that were most meaningful to them. They were invite and submit doan donate mem bealya, personal effects of their loved ones that could be shared in this exhibition, which you can see here. So there was that level of engagement. But, you know, when you have nearly 3,000 people die, expa nin siously close Family Members number about 10 to to 12,000 people and theres no way to engage all of the families in a close par tis paer to, you know, activity in terms of creating the museum, so we worked with representatives. We have nine Family Members open the board of directors. We had a board subcommittee like your committee, sara, that was the Program Content Oversight Committee and the 2 cochairs were both Family Members. We had a Museum Planning conversation series where we brought a group of people together and we thought together and imagined together what this museum could be and then wed come back periodically over a period of eight wreerz to test our ideas and to test our designs and hear from people. We did that with representatives of not just the Family Members, but the other constituents, all of whom had their own sense of what this museum should be. You had first responders, you had survivors, you had rescue and recovery workers, Lower Manhattan residents and business owners, landmark preservationists. We had a large group of people who felt very vested in the outcome of this project sowomen gauged them and we listened. Are there times when the Memorial Mission and the Educational Mission dont exactly run along the same lines . Yes. I have some stories to tell about that that alice remembers well. And in the way the other story is about that. One say picture i think we have a display of hair, the photograph. So in the process of creating the museum, our designers traveled the world and they went to auschwitz. And if any of you have been there were you know that you see in the barracks of auschwitz rooms, this just doesnt do it justice but full of womens hair that are was shaved from the victims and meant to be repurposed and it was there when the soviets liberated the camps. And i think our designers were so moved they said we have to replicate this feeling, it gives a sense of the magnitude of the crime and the humiliation of the victims and of course also their individuality. So there was a plan to display actual hair, auschwitz was going to loan it to us. It set off a huge debate internally. Alice and i am happy to say we were on the same side of that debate, i wont tell you which side. Any way, big internal debate about whether this was appropriate and they brought in rab buys to see was it thee lodgeally appropriate and and they said its fine, its not human remains. But the debate kept going on, different sides feeling very strongly about it. And then in this content committee that i mentioned, one day one of the survivors said, just the thought, just the thought that my mother or sisters hair could be on the dis on display as an object in a museum is too painful for me to bear. And that was it. It was over. I mean, should i go on whom alice referred to, the Museum Director said thats it. And one of the things i learned from him from that are experience is whatever we do at the core, we are a memorial to these victims and everything we do, all our education work, all our genocide prevention work must honor that memory. Another interesting example is we have part of the museum that shows some very difficult imagery of medical experimentation. And we got a letter from a man in the netherlands saying that my father was disabled and was a victim of medical experimentation and you have his picture on display. In fact, we had a few pictures, and i would like you to respectfully remove it. He felt it was ann sult to his fathers memory. And we debated this back and forth. We had the Educational Mission, we wanted our visitors to understand the nature of these criminals, what they were about, the things that they would do, their inhumanity, and yet this was an individual and we wanted to honor his family. We ended up, there were about three images, i think we had shown, we took out all but one, and we lft in the one that we felt was least offensive and gave his father the most dignity and humanity. Let me try and get you to talk a bit about that too. Well, i think the tension is exactly the same even if the details are different. So we see our museum as having both a commemorative function, which is fundamental, central to who we are and what we do, but also an educational function to tell the story of 9 11. We were speaking before the program and there are kids in high school already for whom 9 11 is past history. They have no lived memory of this event. So we have to teach about it and we have to provide as accurate a history as we can that the moment in time. We could not tell the story of 9 11 without talking about the perpetrators, the hijackers, osama bin laden, you simply cant. It would be as if nine 11 were a tsunami, natural disaster. It was not a natural dit after thor. It was planned were perpetrated, conceived, executed by human beings, thats part of the history. So we knew from the very beginning that we would have to include reference to the hijackers. And when we went to our conversation series group with the Family Members who were there as representatives and we presented an idea for using images of the hijackers in the exhibit, some Family Members, and its really important to say that theres no monolithic Family Member response to anything. Youre talking about thousands and thousands of people. They have a range of views. But there were some Family Members who felt particularly strongly that how could we in the same space have a portrait of their loved one in the memorial exhibit and have a portrait of their murderer in the same place. And we went to interesting lengths to respond to that concern. One, we sed seg gras gated the memorial exhibit completely from the history exhibit. One sits on literally on the footprint of the south tower, the other sits on the footprint of the north tower. So they are separated physically. The other thing is as you can see here, we chose images that actually have a little yellow stamp on them. You can see that there. Thats the fbi evidence sticker. These are images that were placed into evidence in the u. S. Versus mu saw we trial. So they are pictures of criminals simply by virtue of the fact that youve got the evidence sticker on them. They are organized by the flights that they were on. So this is a narrative about what happened and who did it. It is not a glor fa occasion of these gifts if their own rights. Were not giving you their biographies were not telling you where they went to school, were not celebrating them, we are presenting them as part of the narrative as actors in the narrative and thats a very different way of thinking about the presentation. But i do have to skrr and obviously we get this in the news business, what do you say to people, well, you gave them ha they wanted. You gave them you gave them prominence. Well, its in the context of a much larger exhibition. I remember years ago we tried to figure out what the museum is 110,000 square feet and the historical exhibition is about 22,000 square feet and this takes up about 500 square feet. So, you know, standing there its not a big part of the exhibition. It is in the context of telling the story. 2 is not a glor if i occasion. But to not include them would be in my estimation like trying to tell the story of the holocaust without mentioning the nazis. Because ive you always told people its important to remember this was 6 Million People were 3,000 people didnt die in a hurricane, it was a crime. Yeah. Now, i think the perpetrators was an issue for us and actually we took a slightly different approach. I think we have some pictures here of the perpetrators, but if you look at our exhibit, our exhibit was done with the same well, let me start by saying the story of course has what we call like the chashs, if you will. Theres obviously the victims, theres the perpetrators, theres people we used to call bystanders, the onlookers and then the heroes of our story to the extent they are rescuers. So this picture shows an early scene of people being humiliated for socalled race defilement, relations between arians and jews. And the important part your attention goes to the woman being humiliated and the nazi, but really the most important people in this picture are the two women and the question is who are these women . What are they think something they seem to be smiling. These what are we call the onlookers. And frankly there will always be evil people in the world, there will always be victims in the world. Evil things happen mostly because of the onlookers and we all end up in that category sooner or later. So thats how we treat them, weinberg once said i created a museum about bystanders for bystanders and that thread is there. Its just hard do a museum about something that didnt happen. Now, when you get to the victims, this is how most of the victims look in a Holocaust Museum. And the people who created the museum were very concerned that our visitor would see these degraded, emace eighted skeletal people and not be able to identify with them because if you look at a picture such as the next one i think we have of hitler youth, look at how happy and radiant these young socalledarian children look. And we wanted our visitor to identify with these victims. So we put the victims at the front of the story and we go to a lot of length to show them actually before they game victims in the fullness of their lives. But what happened at the end is that i think that the perpetrators moved to the background and are not in the foreground and youll have to search kind of hard to find the perpetrators if we go to some of these. Youll find this picture is at the end of the exhibit, you have to kind of look up. We have a few showing the perpetrators in their acts of humiliation. But theres been a shift, i think, in the museum over the last 24 years, and we opened the exhibition really said, the holocaust happened and heres exactly how it happened. And now as we want to be morel to younger generations for whom this might as well be the war of 1812, that will soon be your problem, is we want to talk about why the holocaust happened, what made it possible . And to do that, you have to bring these perpetrators out and talk about who they are, who they were. They werent killers before naziism, they were leading fairly ordinary lives. And we know now a lot about the motivation of some of these killers. Some were true believers, many of them did it for the most mundane reasons. Like career advancement, peer approval, greed, things like that. So i think we feel it is very important to bring the perpetrator back and in a way its going to sound odd, not to bring back some of their humanity, because to remind ourselves that this is a museum about human nature and its about all of us. We all have potential along this horrible spectrum of human behavior. I have to ask, not three or four days go by that i dont get an email from facebook, twitter message from a denier. People who deny the holocaust happened, people who think that 9 11 wasnt real. To what to what degree do you consider your institution a place where doubters can come and learn the truth or is there any communication with them . Well, i would doubters is a nice i would call that youve fa mystic. Well, im not i am speaking of lets say the 15yearold kid growing up today. Yeah. Thats the person we want to reach. Yeah. Its an inknock cuelation, program, if you will. Someone who says this sounds impossible. Who are susceptible to the deniers. You know, theres a great book about holocaust denial, and these are not people interested in truth or historic inquiry, these are antisem miets. So the question is how do we neutralize them, theres no real conversation with them. I mean, the holocaust is probably the best documented crime in history. We have, you know, millions of pages upstairs written by the perpetrators bragging about how many jews theyve killed. So thats not the problem. But the idea is to get to young people early and for people to see that this is this is important history and its worth knowing about and its relevant to you. That really is the the best an nick dote to dee ninial is education. Very much the same, we dont entertain dialogue with the 9 11 truther community, we tell the story and weapon document what happened not just in an objective way through, you know, news reports, but from the inside. It is what human beings experienced on that day. When you go through the historical exhibition, you dont even get there until after youve been in this large almost beyond imagination hugescale space. Youve seen the memorial exhibition, you understand the human toll of the event. You come into the story of 9 11 and we take you moment by moment through the day. So you are experiencing it as those of us who were alive on that day, witnessed it whether watching television or on the street in Lower Manhattan or wherever you were having a sequence of emotions that are replicated in the way we tell this story. So you are sara just said something about relating, seeing yourself in the story. And that is very much the way you engage audiences for who come and say this has nothing to do with me. Suddenly its theyre feeling a Human Emotion that we all felt and it is very real, very powerful, very profound. You move through the events of the day, you come to a section that is about the who did this and why. But then you come out again into what we call 9 12, the world after 9 11, which is also rooted in personal stories, personal experience. And we take you through not only the recovery and what happened in the nine months at ground zero, the year at the pentagon, but we give you the scientific analysis that was done on why the different buildings fell, the work that was done by the National Institute of science and technology which did all the forensic study on the steel coming from manhattan. They did work as well as the faa did work on the planes, what happened inside the planes. So we simply present the evidence. And theres no apology for it, we are not trying to prove a point, we are simply saying, this is what happened. And we allow the exhibition to speak for itself. We do acc nom that there are questions, we acknowledge that people questioned the veracity of this story. But we provide the Scientific Evidence to refute it. I could get you before we go to questions, each of you to talk about what the architecture and the use of space has suggested in each of the museums, how youve tried to use that to make a statement and create a presence and a feeling with people. I think we have some pictures of our architecture here. So our architect who jamesing ingoe freed was himself a refugee from nazi germany, wanted the architecture not to represent the holocaust but more to evoke aspects of it. So for him temperature was very important that as you entered the building you were being sent various signals that youre entering a place where the world is upside down, if you will. Civilization is fractured. Here you see in the hall of witness upstairs some of that, purting you all of kilter. You see in the next photograph i think we have a little bit of the industrial nature of the building. You can see that hes actually its a little bit hard to see, but if you look on the righthand side of your screen, the h vac system is somewhat exposed with those industrial vents. If you look on the left, you see this is the entrance here to our exhibit for young children. If you see the way the steel is used to brace the brick, he was inspired by having seen at places like auschwitz the way the creamaer to were built, and they too were built of brick, they too were braced with zeal so that they would not explode from overuse. So, again, this is in his head, this is evocative. And then i think we have one last one, i just want to show you. This Grand Staircase which actually very gradually narrows as it gets to the top, very reminiscent of that Railroad Track leading into auschwitz. But what is at the top . Its actually a window but its a boardedup window if you look out that window and through the slots what do you see . The Washington Monument. So do you see this tension that hes always creating between the inside and the outside. The other thing thats important is this magnificent glass skylight that covers this entire hall of witness. You know, his point, the holocaust happened really in many ways in the light of day. We knew, we knew early, everybody knew, and also we was struck by the fact that you would hear accounts from the victims that would say, i would look up at the sky and think that that sky, that is unis shining on me but also on people in the free world. And they would see birds or butterflies and of course think about the freedom that had been denied them. So that skylight is a theme repeated throughout the museum. Well, you know, i think memory itself is a intersection of cognitive understanding and emotional intelligence. And so when one is in a Memorial Museum, you are learning through the mind but also through the heart. And the architecture becomes the visceral expression much as it is here in jim freeds magnificent design. It becomes the space in which you learn by feeling it. So i mentioned the slurry wall earlier. One of the things that happen with this project being at the site of ground zrooe zero, the World Trade Center site, is that the site itself was eligible for land plark status. And the project had received federal money to which was part of the appropriation that Congress Gave to rebuild all of Lower Manhattan, a portion of it came for the memorial and the museum. And once you receive federal money, as sara knows, you are obligated to follow federal law. We fell under because of the landmark status eligibility, we fell under the federal preservation act and we were required to make these remnants of struck stur thture that were the site visible to the public. The only way you can see something thats 70 feet below ground is to go be70 feet below ground. Our architects had the challenge of building a building you could not see because it was below ground other than our entry pavilion. Davis brodie bond who were the architects of the below grade space had to come one a mechanism for conveying meaning in a nonbuilding because you were going into the bowels of the vacant cavity of the World Trade Center. They allowed this slurry wall, this enstliernlt stliernlt he w to serve as the they wanted do something that was both tied to the site and also strategic in terms of the emotional affect of the visitor. So there was always a construction ramp at the World Trade Center when it was under correction in the 60s, after 9 11, the hall road was put in, that was the road that went down to ground zero, was used to bring the debris out, but it was also the way that Family Members and dig that tears wourry wouldn and observe it. So they made this slight decent that you would go down into this space. You feel like youre processing towards something. It generates an attitude of reverence, and as you move down the ramp, there are these periodic vistas that open in front of you and you see the space and you get a sense of scale, but you also get a sense of the authentic. And youre moving into the space before youre ever told the story. There are hints about it, we begin with the voices of people from around the world remembering where they were on 9 11. This wads a global event, it wasnt just an event of the states. But it is more about the physical environment that is actually conveying meaning in an affective and motive way. So when you see the slurry wall for the first time from that will overlook, you honestly dont know what youre looking at pu know its big, you understand that its probably original because it doesnt look finished, but you dont fully get it. Its in a space called Foundation Hall. Youre going to come back to Foundation Hall multiple times in your visit when you arrive at bedrock, when you come out of the historical exhibition, and the slurry wall which is 60 feet high by 60 feet wide the portion that is exposed here, the whole thing still rings the site, but in human scale, it is overwhelming. Its enormous. Now, the slurry wall hads a story. It wasnt just the retaining wall that was built in the old days and when the buildings were standing, the lateral bracing of the underground parking garage floors, which are is when whereyoure standing when youre look into the space for the first time, that held the slurry wall until place. On 9 slr 11, two 110 foot tall build gds fell in place. But the debris had to be removed. So as the recovery workers removed layer after layer after layer of debris, they had to reinforce this wall with these tie walls with the tiebacks, anchors shot back into the concrete, they reenforce it, but there was evidence of cracking. That was found soon after the recovery effort began. Mayor giuliani was notified of this. Governor pataki, fema. It was not made public, because the authorities did not want to panic an already panicked community, but slurry wall breached, the subway tunnels in Lower Manhattan would have flooded. And Lower Manhattan would have been inundated. So they worked very hard. They watched it for nine months. They reinforced, reinforced, reinforced. The end of the nine months, the wa wall had held. And when the architect learns the story of the slurry wall, he in his proclivity to be metaphoric in his architecture sees the wallace the physical metaphor as the strength, the endurance, the resilience of our nation and our national values. So when you are standing at the foot of the slurry wall when you finally get down to bedrock and it is 60 feet above you, you are overwhelmed by the majesty of this raw evidence of what was once simply a foundation. And the meaning is multilayered. Its not just Foundation Hall, because youre looking at a foundational structure of the World Trade Center. Its Foundation Hall, because youre at ground zero, but the balance has now changed. It is not ground zero where something horrific happened. It is ground zero from where you build up from. And that is the message of the museum. So youre feeling it as much as hoei knowing it. And i think thats the role of the architecture in this space. Let me call for the cards now and questions that will be coming up, and if you could pass them out to ushers that are there. Let me ask another question while the cards are being prepared. Each of your museums also has a role to play as a collector of artifacts and important clues and tokens. And the word memento is hardly i guess hardly encompasses it. But tamat the same time, can i you both to talk about the role in keeping collections that you have available to the public and scholars . Well, i would say that we talked a lot about wine beburg. And he said this is a storystelling museum. That the objects you see here mo mean nothing outside of the context of the stories. The objects here, for example you see the barracks, the objects here, theyre authentic. They tell the story, but they are meant to also provide mood, environment, emotional power, authenticity at the same time. So this is what we euphemisticallly call this design opencase design. Which means theres no case. In most museums you go and see objects in cases. You know, i think its fair to say, a shoe is pretty much just a shoe, except if youre seeing a shoe in this museum, and you all are familiar with our shoes. Another example of opencase design. You dont really need a text panel to explain what youre seeing with the shoes, but they advance, and i think alice referred to at the 9 11 museum, this goal of the education and the emotional moments, this pacing that the exhibit journey puts you through, and this is obviously one of those emotional moments. And i think we have another picture here of also the railroad car, also an artifact but you literally, you know, you walk through it. This is not typical of most museums. Now i should add, and this is probably true for alice as well, that in addition to objects on display, our collection has been used by the Justice Department to help track down nazis living illegally in this country. Its been used by survivors, documenting claims for compensation. Frankly, scott, you talked about denial. To me, it plays a role in providing the authentic evidence. Most importantly, perhaps, its also a memorial, but so it performs many roles. I just wanted to tell you a little story about scholarship, because its fairly recent. One of our, a scholar was here actually looking through some records from the stazi, i dont know if you are old enough to remember the cold war, the east german secret police, their version of the kgb were called the stazi. They held a lot of trials for the nazis. And they found information on this woman. Her name is erna petry. And they were killing children. She wrote a book on women in the ss. And its an extraordinary story. And so even 70 years after the holocaust, the collection is still helping us understand what happened. Im going to share a story about artifacts. As curators, artifacts are everything. Theyre the objects, the connection to another human being who might have touched them or owned them. Theyre the palpable evidence of history. And he did feel very strongly that artifacts were okay, but they were, you know, sort of secondary to the story. And over the years, this didnt change. I mean, we got a beautiful storyit telli storytelling museum, and i remember going to him and i said, you know, if there were a fire in the museum, what would you take out . And he said, without hesitation, the mail can. The mail can that was hitten in the warsaw ghetto with the archive of the jewish community. He talked a good game, but this is a man who really got objects in a very profound way. Our collections, we had to build them from scratch, but we had the advantage of an extraordinary situation, which is the World Trade Center is owned by the Port Authority of new york and new jersey, a bistate agency, not known for historic preservation. Thats not what they do. They manage bridges and tunnels and airports. And immediately, immediately after 9 11, the Port Authority had this freshance, this sense that this was a historic event that needed to be documented. And they sent architects, engineers and curators went into the field, into the pile in the early weeks of the recovery and with spray cans, spray paint cans identified pieces of steel that should be saved either because they could be used forensically for engineering studies or because they would help tell the story. So this material, which represented less than one half of 1 of all of the debris, which was 1. 8 million tons of debris at ground zero, filled an 80,000 square foot airline hangar. At jfk. So we had an extraordinary amount of material to choose from for the exhibition. But also, as the basis for our collection. We obviously went out and encouraged Family Members, witnesses, survivors to also contribute material. We built the collection over the years, and it is for research of its for scholars. Its for lending to other museums and organizations. We have loaned a piece of World Trade Center steel to nato headquarters in brussels. And the power of that is that 9 11 was the first time in history that article v was invoked. And article v is the rule that all nato members, if one is attacked, it is as if all have been attacked. It had never been invoked before. So standing in front of the new headquarters in brussels theend this year will be a piece of World Trade Center steel. We share what we have, we learn from it. One of the areas where there needs to be much more documentation now, because the situation is becoming more and more and more acute is the matter of 9 11related illness and the deaths that are occurring as a result of exposure to World Trade Center dust dust. There are going to be probably tens of thousands of fatalities as a result of that exposure. There are now thousands of people suffering from cancers. And we are beginning to collect the documentation, working with various legal firms, law firms that have worked in the l litigation on this to document what has happened, what has been done and to be automobile ble tt story too. Were apparently getting a lot of questions, i guess. Both within the audience and the digital audience, who are asking about the evolution of both of your museums to include terrorism. One of the things that certainly has made my wife and i very devoted to this museum is the idea that history doesnt stop in 1945, but has continued on with bosnia, rwanda, somalia, alas, we could both go on. Are you now expanding to try and encompass questions about terrorism and certainly, in your case, alice, what happened at 9 11 is often seen as obviously a salvo in a struggle that continues. Well, i would say terrorism per se is not within our mandate, however, genocide and related crimes against humanity is, so we have the Simon Scott Center for the prevention of genocide. And about two years ago sent a very brave young woman on staff, the granddaughter of holocaust survivors, i should add. She wanted to go into Northern Iraq to find refugees from isis, people who had survived isis, to document those crimes. And she came back. Shes a lawyer, and she wrote up a report based on the evidence she gathered. And she made a determination that they had indeed committed genocide. And this led both the state department and congress to agree with that finding. So i would say unfortunately, terrorism, extremism and genocide are conjernliverging t days, but thats where we would enter that topic. One of the great challenges of the 9 11 Memorial Museum was that we knew that we had a story to tell that was specific to where we were located, specific to a moment in time. But it was a story that wasnt over yet. So, you know, museums are finite spaces. Exhibitions are finite spaces, but this is a story that wasnt finite. So we had to figure out how to balance those two realities. What we did was focus on the events that happened at this site. So we take you chronologically through to the end of the recovery in 2002. But the historical exhibition doesnt end there. It continues with a set of questions that come out of 9 11 that we are still negotiating. We havent figured out the answers yet. Questions like, in a world where terrorism is a real and present threat, how do democracies protect the homeland while also ensuring the preservation and protection of Civil Liberties . We have not worked that out yet. So these questions that come out of this event have defined the post9 11 world, to define the world we live in, and that opens us up through our programming, through areas in the museum where we track news events that have come from 9 11 but are happening in this moment in time. We have a, its called a time scape. And every day, there are new stories on the wall that are directly related to what started in 2001. So we are not a museum about preventing terrorism, because we dont fundamentally believe that thats possible. You can try your best, and god knows our agencies are doing that. Theyre trying very hard to protect us. But as Margaret Thatcher said, the terrorists only have to be right once. We have to be right every time. So its not about that. Its about being aware of the both on the one hand the tensions in the world that lead to this kind of action and tragedy but also the other side of the coin, that if we dont have any control over terrorism, the one thing we do have control over is our own response to it. And in many respects, were the 9 12 museum as much as the 9 11 museum. And thats where we can provide a hopeful message. Lauren on twitter asks, is there a limit as to how much you will push your audience emotionally . Yeah. How do you decide what to include . Absolutely. And, you know, we spent eight years trying to figure out what would go into this museum. And the debates were just so furious and intense. We really had to think about what was appropriate to present in the public space of a museum. 9 11 happened on the cusp of the beginning of the 21st century. We have access to the most extraordinary documentation. We have 9 11 calls. We have radio transmissions of firefighters in the building, cockpit voice recorders where you hear the hijackers. We had to decide what was appropriate and not appropriate. And we have to choose, even though you can find it on the internet, we felt that we had an obligation to be respectful of both the families of the victims and the people we were there to commemorate. And there were certain things that were off limits, that we would not include, and it didnt take away from our ability to tell the story. I would say that a big discussion all along the way was to make sure you did not sentimentalize the history that you did not manipulate the visitor. Nothing worse than a visitor who feels that their emotions are being manipulated. And there was a sense here that the facts are so extraordinary, just tell them in the most basic, understated way, i think he used to say, there will be no adjectives or adverbs in any of the exhibition texts. Just say the facts. And frankly, hes right. Its just put out there what happened. Now we did go to Great Lengths to minimize graphic imagery. In todays world, it looks almost a little bit silly, but then, it was a big discussion. Theres only three places that you see very difficult imagery. We felt we had to do that. Theyre behind privacy walls. You see people using them here. But our goal is not to shock. Its to educate and to get people to think and to ask deep questions and do Critical Thinking about their role in society. So if you just come out and oh, my god, people are so horrible to one another, if thats your answer, then we failed. Thats not, its not the horror that is the message here. Its that this happened in an advanced, western society, highly educated, with a democratic constitution, a rule of law, a free press. That society went into total social collapse and genocide. Thats what we want people thinking about. Not necessarily the details of how they committed mass murder. Although we must document that thats very important as well. Question, obviously, for you, sarah, i understand the Memorial Museum is in the process of redesign or a, looks like a renewal of a permanent exhibit, which you talk about the narratives and new discoveries in history the last 20 years that will be endpanlgaged in th permanent exhibit. Yes, its a revitalization. Our first motto is do no harm, but it is old. And one of the big things that happened since the museum opened, really, the fall of the soviet union, access to millions and millions of pages of archives and stories that dont really get their due in that exhibition. Our collection has grown dramatically. But more importantly, weve done a lot of exhibitions that examine this why question, and we want that to be incorporated. We did an exhibit because of the rise of the internet of nazi propaganda and using the latest technology of their day. I mean, they would be all over social media today. They were, earlier than anybody else to understand its power. Another example i mentioned before was an exhibit we did on collaboration and complicity where we now understand so much more about human motivation, and we can tell a lot of very simple stories about ordinary people who had choices to help or not help. I mean, this is just a very interesting picture here. You see a local town. Their neighbors have just been deported. All their jewish neighbors. And what are they doing . Theyre at a public auction of the personal belongings of their neighbors. Buying things, cheaply. Ive never seen that. Well, you have to come see this exhibition, scott. Ive been all over. Ive never soon that. Its just down this hallway here. Well begin with you, alice. In your efforts to engage young people, how do you use the role of technology in the museum . Young people these days are bored by stuff thats five years old, sometimes. Well, we actually use a lot of Digital Technology in the telling of the 9 11 story. It was the most digitallydocumented event of all time up until now. And so, you know, we actually hired a design team that brought media designers on board immediately. So we conceptualized the museum in terms of the application of available tools and innovation. But i would have to say that, you know, people go through our museum and are focussing on the technology. Then we really miss the mark. The technology is there because we use it as the best way to tell the story. Its always in the service of storytelling. So what youre looking at right here is an interface that is adjust in front of something known as the last column. The last column is a 36foottall core column from the south tower that ended up being the very last piece of twin tower steel to be brought out of the World Trade Center site at the end of the recovery in may 2002. And before it was brought out of the site, recovery workers signed their names, pasted missing posters, mass cards, memorabilia, left messages. Its like a totem of recovery. And at this end of the recovery, it was cut down in a ceremony, laid on a flatbed truck covered with a shroud and an American Flag and escorted out of the site by honor guard. It is now standing upright in the museum as evidence of the community that coalesced around the recovery, both literally and in the broader sense of the world coming together after 9 11. And in order to allow our visitors to interrogate all of the inscriptions on the last column, we have this interface that you work like an iphone. You move it up and down and around, and you can sigh things that are 36 feet above you that you couldnt see otherwise, and its an intimate engagement with the inscriptions. And there are hotspots. You go beyond the inscription to learn about the person who wrote it or the company they were with or the unit they were with. So it gives you access. And i think the use of technology, if its going to be effective, must be that it is the best and most potent way of telling your story. So im just going to give one more example. And that is, we have an enormous number of oral histories of people who evacuated and escaped and tell their story. Of first responders. We wanted to give people access to that material. But inviting people to sit and listen to an hourlong oral history is not necessarily the most effective use of peoples time or the most effective way to tell the story. So, as you move through the events of the day, there are what we call audio alcoves in strategic moments. And inside these alcoves, you are able to literally hear the story of an evacuation, but told by multiple people. Each from their own perspective. Theres snippets of oral histories interwoven in some cases with actual archival recording. So youre using oral history in a completely new way. It completes the narrative. And we have one example of it if we have time to just share a snippet. This is in one of the alcoves relating to the rescue, first responders. Its a firefighter by the name of oreo palmer who did not survive on 9 11. And we asked permission from his family. We did that routinely if we were asking for recordings of people who were killed in the events, and youre listening and in that moment. So i dont know if we can pull that up. Its a quick, yeah, okay, so youre looking at the towers. Theyre just wire frames. And now youre going to hear this snippet of one of these audio experiences. Ive been compromised. 104. Were coming up behind you. So that content is also intersperinte interspersed with the memories and recollections of people who were evacuated. The people who were going down as these guys were going up. So you get a very immediate, very powerful sense of what that day was like. Literally, the inside story. And thats where the media tells, allows us to tell the story, but youre not focussed on the media, youre focussed on the story. Sara . I dont want to follow that. That was, i couldnt even read the words. I could just hear the tone of the voice. And its quite moving. Like alice, im skeptical of technology. You can have a lot of activity and not a real engagement. We are doing some experiments right now. Right now we have an opportunity to do Virtual Reality for visitors and actually enter a destroyed city in syria. And you actually tour the city, and you can see the massive destruction perpetrated by the assad regime. We also have an opportunity here, this is a little bit hard to tell whats happening, but thats actually a shipping container and you, this experiment is over now, but it was an opportunity to actually talk to somebody, a refugee, who had fled either syria or isis and was either, they were either in i think germany or turkey in refugee camps, and talk in real time, facetoface, about their experience. So theres a translator on the other end of and this actually is a holocaust survivor talking to one of these survivors. So, again, its like alice said. Its not about the technology, how we do it. Were trying to really humanize the experience of fleeing isis, what is it like to have survived that. I have two questions to conclude our time together. And both of you have been hosts to so many names we would recognize who have come to visit your museums. Im wondering who you remember. I bet it may not be some of the most recognizable names. Well, i would say, first of all, the most important people who walk through our doors are young people. And to see them interact with survivors is the best in the world. Do we all remember, i see some young people. Washington was the murder capital of the world. Some of us remember that, and we imported a new police chief from chicago, his name was charles ramsey. I think we have a picture of chief ramsey here. And chief ramsey came, and shortly after taking office here to fix our city, he came on a tour with david friedman, the head of our adl chapter here. And chief ramsey came out of the exbig, a exhibition, and he said i was moved by a human be being but really taken aback as an officer. How did my profession get on the walls of your museum . And he had this idea, solely his idea, to create a Training Program for all recruits to the washington, d. C. Police force that would look at the slow evolution of german policing, from the democracy of germany into the early stages of the nazi period and then into war and genocide. And this program, which examines that evolution, its not just about interest moral compass. Its about their professional ethics. Their role in society. Their relationship to the constitution. And it became so popular that the then head of the fbi asked if we could replicate it for every new fbi agent. So now we do law enforcement, fbi, military, the judiciary and the same type of program. And it was all because chief ramsey walked in this museum and had an idea about us that was so much bigger than we understood we were. Such a great story. Well, you know, as a jewish girl from long island, meeting the pope was pretty incredible. [ laughter ] that was just amazing. And what you sigh ee is what yo get. Hes very hamish, isnt he . He wears a yamaka. This is a man. He doesnt know that. But he is. I bet he does know that. He probably does. Yeah. Weve had president s. Weve had the duke and duchess of cambridge, but i have to tell you, the people who matter are not the ones whose names you necessarily know. And just a few weeks ago, we, we have a Recording Studio on the premises. We invite our visitors to tell their 9 11 story that can be added to one of the exhibits on a periodic basis. We invite people to share memories, if they knew someone who was killed on 9 11, they can share a memory that is incorporated into the memorial regularly. They can answer some of those tough questions that we end the historical exhibition with and engage in dialog with other visitors and other people whove answered those questions. Or you can just leave a message. And a few weeks ago, a message was left by a young man. Jordan co almolladner. 18 years old, who had come to the memorial on his birthday to stand in front of his mothers portrait in the exhibition. And we would not have known this. This is a woman who worked in the north tower, obviously killed on that day. And i dont know how he could do this. But in the most composed way possible he told us about his experience that day, that he had come to our museum to spend his birthday with his mom. And what he most wanted is for her to be proud of the man he had become. That, to me, is what this museum is here to do. Its a place of healing. Its a place where you can mourn. Its a place where you can recognize the best of yourself, which was what was demonstrated after 9 11, in the face of the worst possible demonstration of what we can do as human beings, we saw the best. And jordan reminded me of that when i heard that recording. Thats the most memorable one for me right now. Im not sure i want to follow that with another question, but we want to give maximum value here. Theres so much Information Available online now. Theres so many people who believed that they can, and do learn things electronically, almost, Virtual Reality. What is the role of the museum in an age when many people think that you can essentially sit in chairs like were occupying now and learn pretty much what you need to, and were all pathetically dependent on those technologies, too. I think the museum is going to become more important as we go off in our echo chambers and live on our social media with likeminded opinions. To me, its a place where you bring strangers together. And they have sometimes a shared experience. Or theyre in the same place. But you create an experience, an environment. And you stimulate a new set of conversations. And when i look at whats happening to communities and to our education system, i think that the role of museums will become more important in teaching everything from history, civics, but also how to have conversations with people that you know and people you dont know. Especially difficult conversations. And i think both of our institutions will play a bigger role in the civic life of this nation in the future. Totally agree with that. There are studies that have found that museums are the at the top of the list of the most trustworthy places to learn. And i take that very seriously, that people dont trust half of what they see online. For good reason. For good reason. Yeah. And museums are the Gold Standard right now of places to learn. And they are places of informal education, where it can be communally experienced, talk to the person youre with, engage in conversation, but it is trustworthy. And we need to honor that. We have an obligation to provide the accurate history. But, even more, in a world where virtual is everywhere, encountering reality is really important. And theres nothing more real than the shoes in the Holocaust Museum. Theres nothing more real than that boxcar. Theres nothing more real than the slurry wall. Theres nothing more real than the wallet that belonged to a woman killed on 9 11 who had gone to windows on the world the night before and the receipt is still in the wallet. This is real life of and i think the palpable reality that one experiences in museums, with all the media enhancements, its that connection that you make to other human beings and to real human experience, human choices. That, to me, is the role of the museum. Well, we want to thank you all very much for being here. Both of these institutions have important and even more important than ever roles to play in Uncertain Times in an uncertain future where we look for illumination and moral compass at the same time. Thank you very much for joining all of us tonight. [ applause ] tomorrow is the 242nd anniversary of the event known as the shot heard around the world on concords north ridge and triggered the start of the revolutionary war in the spring of 1775. Join us in the morning for the opening of the museum of the American Revolution in philadelphia. Former Vice President joe biden and historian and author David Mccullough are scheduled to speak. Watch live starting at 10 30 eastern on cspan 2. Sunday night, on afterwords. Congressman ken buck of colorado, also a member of the Freedom Caucus discusses his book drain the swamp. When you arrive in d. C. And you have the surroundings that i described earlier, you get very comfortable comfortable in that situation, and you dont want to give up those comforts, and the way to continue to earn those comforts is to spend more money and to grow government and to not solve problems but to create programs and take credit for those programs, whether theyre efficient, whether theyre effective, to take credit for those programs, and so of many of the members of congress are here, its the best job theyve ever had. Its the highestpaying job theyve ever had, and its a job that they dont want to give up. And so their reelection is more important than the actual problemsolving that needs to go on in d. C. Watch afterwords, sunday night at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans book tv. Next, American History tv hosts a discussion with david skorton, david ferri etch ro and carla hayden. They talk about the challenges they face and the opportunities they see ahead. From the library of congress. We are here in the library of congress for a discussion among three people. And my opening question is to our host of this conversation, carla hayden, who is the brandnew, 14th librarian of Congress Starting her job in the fall of 2016. Why did you take this job . Let me have you finish this sentence. I took this job because i want to open this wonderful Treasure Chest to as man p