I would also like to welcome our digital audience joining from around the globe. We really hope that during tonights conversation you will share reflections and ask questions of our panelists using the powerofmemory. Tonights program as part of a series of conversations we are posting examining the power of memory to shape our future. This season, we are taking timeout 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 we host, we hope you will 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 . For 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 . I am sure similar Big Questions have been asked about the 9 11 museum about your role and year vision and tonights conversation will examine that and more. It is important to note that one of our founders often said this museum is not an answer, but a question. We, at the museum, say the holocaust poses many questions and it is our job to never stop asking why. Tonight, we are joined by sara bloomfield, the director of the United States memorial Holocaust Memorial museum and alice greenwald, the president and ceo of the 9 11 memorial and museum. They have been friends and colleagues for 30 years. Tonight, they will 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 and all of us. Now it is my pleasure to introduce tonights moderator and the esteemed host of nprs Weekend Edition saturday and nbcs weekend morning, scott simon. Mr. Simon cbs actually, but it any case. [laughter] thats all right, thank you. I wonder how much that little mistake will cost me. [laughter] look, its an honor to be here. My wife and i feel very strongly about any small thing and there are small things we are able to do to try and support the work of this institution and it strikes me that both of these museums have taken on the task of vivifying memories in a way that make them alive in our lives and makes their importance 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 have sprung out of events that we struggle to understand and yet want to live lives that bring that understanding into the sense of sense of purpose we can bring them. So, thank you. We are here with sara and alice. A couple of housekeeping notes. Each of you received a note card when you may have entered here this evening. At the end of the discussion, ushers will fan out and collect your cards so you might have them ready as it is you can and for those of you watching at home, you can submit questions using powerofmemory on twitter. It looks like a twitter address and we are at the Holocaust Memorial in museum tonight, but the studio and digital audiences may not have been to the 9 11 Memorial Museum in new york. I understand you have a tour to give us. Pres. Greenwald we will show you footage taken by drone in the museum so we will show you what it is like to fly through, which you will never be able to do. [laughter] so we can show that. Pres. Greenwald i just want to say what you dont see in the footage are the core exhibitions. The reason being we were not going to put the drone inside small spaces with whiny pathways. It would have been much too dangerous for the artifacts, but you will see footage of that later on. You have worked at the museum for several years. What are the lessons you take from this place that you brought to new york . Pres. Greenwald there were several. On the practical side of things, i had the extraordinary privilege of joining this project in the mid1980s. 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 onto early years of operation, so i had 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. More importantly, i was exposed to i consider him a genius, adam weinberg, 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, how do you portray explicit content in the public space of a museum, how do you balance commemoration with the documentation of history in a responsible way . What do you do about children . Under aged visitors . What can you show and what cant you show . All of those questions were ingrained in me so that when i came to new york, five ears after the attacks we started working on the museum in 2006, the circumstances were different, the history is different, the story we are telling is different, but the questions were the same. I was able to bring those questions to the process of imagining what this museum could be. Mr. Simon let me ask about an instance of each institution, the significance of location. Sara, the Holocaust Memorial museum is obviously located thousands of files from most of the events that are memorialized and portrayed here. What is the significance of having this place on the National Mall . Dir. Bloomfield location, location, location. You know, in the world of holocaust memory, alices museum is auschwitz for our world and auschwitz is about that very place and what happens there. We 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. It is a very precious piece of real estate, not just in washington, d. C. , but here on the National Mall and the architect who designed the museum very much wanted the museum to be an 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 a side that faces most of the smithsonian and he wanted people to remember that if you are coming from the smithsonian, you have 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 a part of the story of human nature and if you enter the other side of the museum you come off the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial and there, you are seeing our monuments to freedom and the architect designed a lot of windows where you can just barely make out you are looking at this lens of the holocaust, but you see a glimmer of jefferson and washington. The last thing i would say is we are in the seat of power and we speak about power and the power of the individual and the possibility of the abusive power. This image is showing what you come in from the entrance on what you might call the freedom side, which is a reminder of american values. I think we designed the museum to speak to this piece of real estate. Mr. Simon is there some statement, too. This is where i must tell you what i tell our daughters, this terrible event was also part of American History. This is also part of who we are. Dir. Bloomfield yes, and the permanent exhibition that alice worked on and she mentioned our colleague who lead that effort, that exhibit actually began with the american story, the american g. I. s. A little bit of history since this is meant to be a behind the scenes, before we opened to see what would be the reaction to a Holocaust Museum on the mall for the very reason you said, scott. People said, why washington . We looked at groups of people who had lived through world war ii and had lived through world war ii, jews, and nonjews. There was universal agreement that the holocaust was one of those pivotal event in human history, something that everyone should know about, but why would you build it in washington . Doesnt it belong in berlin or jerusalem . So we designed the architecture and the exhibitions to try to answer that question. The first part of your museum experiences hearing from that american g. I. Who asked the big question, how is it that human beings can do this to one another . And throughout the exhibition we keep bringing back what america and win american new it and how did america respond to it or not and i have two plugs because the 25th anniversary is opening and we will open an exhibit on america and the nazi threat that deals with this topic. Mr. Simon alice, let me get you to talk a bit about the significance of your museums location. There were a lot of plans in the aftermath when people could try 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. Pres. Greenwald absolutely. Because we are located at the site of the atrocity, one of the locations of the attacks, it is more like being a museum in a battleground, a battlefield. There is a sense of consecration. There is a sense of sacred space. The pools you saw literally sit within the footprints of the twin towers. They are about the void that was left in the aftermath of the loss of the towers. The museum is literally below the memorial plaza. The plaza is our roof and you go down seven stories, you go down 70 feet to 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. It is accentuated by the visible presence, the palpable presence of elements of original Institute Structure that remains. You are looking at the wall on the left that was the retaining wall that was built when the World Trade Center was first under construction in the 1960s to keep the hudson river out of the construction site. They dug a 16acre, sevenstory hole in Lower Manhattan and the river was right there. There was no Battery Park City or world a natural center, there was water, so they had to keep the water out. In the cases of the foundation of the World Trade Center, you are very conscious of this urban archaeology when you are in the museum. In many respects, most museums are places that house artifacts. We are a museum literally housed within an artifact and you never lose sense of that place, the power of plays, the authentic envelope you are in, it is constantly reference as you move through the museum and i think it intensifies the emotion of the experience. Mr. Simon 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 . Pres. Greenwald 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 other flight all part of the narrative. We commemorate all the victims of the attacks, 2977 people. People on all 4 planes on all three locations, two towers in new york, and we also commemorate the 6 People Killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing because they also died at this site. Mr. Simon sara, lets begin this next question i have with you, but i will also enlist you on it, alice. Each of you have had to deal with have had to deal, forgive me, that is exactly not how i should put it. Have been able to enrich what you have 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 you have done here . Dir. Bloomfield let me start by saying something about alices museum because before even alice worked there, after the attacks, they fairly quickly had a group that brought in some advisors to ask about how to go about memorializing this or creating a museum and i was one of many people who was asked about it and having lived through this experience, my answer was it is too soon, it is too soon because we opened 48 years after the event and you opened what, 13 years . 13 years after the event. Knowing what we had been through, i could imagine what it would be like for the families and the survivors and the process, what they would need from it would be so hard and so complicated 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 probably should have had educators talking about this story line. People participated together. I would say there were some issues about that. One experience i remember having maybe eight months before the museum was open, a survivor who was very involved in the creation came up to me and said very sweetly, will the exhibit text will be both in english and yiddish, right . I said, you know, it will be about the yiddish people and the culture and the identity in very many ways, but our audience will not be speaking and reading yiddish and i said, think of our audience. Think of the farmer from iowa, that is the person we want to come here. We want to introduce the holocaust and let them think this was important. Mr. Simon alice, can i get you mr. Simon alice, can i 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. Pres. Greenwald absolutely. It was contentious, there is no way to get around that. You had all the raw emotion sara is talking about, which is a consequence of trying to crystallize a story that is so fresh and so raw for people, but there were two parts of the 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. They are not organized alphabetically, they are arranged where you were and the context of that day for you. If you are on one of the planes, flight 175 that was hijacked and crashed into tower two, the names on those victims would be on the south pool, which is located where tower 2 was. Families are invited to make requests to create what were called adjacencies, meaningful adjacencies where if their loved one was close to someone at work, a colleague, or was a relative of someone at work or in some cases, this is 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 adjacencies and we were able to actually honor all of them. That was one way families of victims were deeply invested in the process. For the museum, the core of the commemorative part of the museum is our memorial exhibition, where we have a room that is floor to ceiling all 4 walls filled with the faces and names of those who were killed, nearly 3000 people. We went to families and invited them to submit the portraits that were most meaningful to them. They were invited to submit and donate memorabilia, personal affect of their loved ones that could be shared in this exhibition, which you can see here. There was that level of engagement, but when you have nearly 3000 people die, exponentially close Family Members, number about 10,000 to 12,000 people and there is no way to engage all the families in a close participatory activity in terms of creating the museum, so we worked with representatives. We had 9 Family Members on the board of directors, we had a board subcommittee like your committee, sara, that was the Program ContentOversight 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 would be and would come back periodically over a period of eight years to test our ideas and 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 and so, we engaged them and we listened. Mr. Simon are there times when the Memorial Mission and the Educational Mission dont exactly run along the same lines . Dir. Bloomfield yes. I have some stories to tell about that that alice remembers well. In a way, the yiddish story is about that as well. One is about i think we have a picture of our display of hair, the photographs. In the process of creating the museum, our designers traveled the world and went to auschwitz and if any of you have been there, you know that you see, in the barracks of auschwitz, rooms it just doesnt do it justice, but full of womens hair that 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, their individuality. There was a plan to display actual hair, auschwitz was going to loan it to us and it set off a huge debate internally. Alice and i were on the same side of that debate, i am happy to say, i will not tell you which side. There was a big, internal debate about whether this was appropriate and they brought in rabbis to see if it was theologically appropriate and they said, it is fine, it is not human remains, but the debate kept going on, different sides feeling strongly about it and in this content committee i mentioned, one day, one of the survivors said, just the thought, just the thought that my mother or sisters hair could be on display as an object in a museum is too painful for me to bear and that was it, it was over. Adam weinberg, who alice referred to, the Museum Director said, that is it. Everything we do, all of our education work, all of our genocide prevention work, must honor that memory. Another interesting example is we have part of the museum that shows very difficult imagery of medical experimentation. 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 an insult to his fathers memory. 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 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 left in the one that we felt was least offensive and gave his father the most dignity and humanity. Mr. Simon let me try and get you to talk a bit about that, too. Pres. Greenwald i think the intention is exactly the same, even if the details are different. 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 we could not tell the story of 9 11 without talking about the perpetrators, the hijackers, osama bin laden, you simply cannot, it would be as if 9 11 were a tsunami, a natural disaster, it was not a natural disaster, it was planned, perpetrated, conceived, executed by human beings. That is part of the history. 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 it is really important to say that there is no model that a Family Member response to anything. You are talking about thousands of thousands of people that have a range of views. There were some Family Members that felt particularly strongly that how could we, in the same space that we have a portrait of their loved one in the memorial exhibit and have a portrait of their murderer in the same place. We went to interesting lengths to respond to that concern. One, we segregated the memorial exhibit completely from the history exhibit. One sits on literally the footprint of the south tower and the other sits on the footprint of the north tower, or they are separated physically. The other thing, as you can see here, we chose images that actually have a little yellow stamp on them, you can see that is the fbi evidence sticker. These are images that were placed into evidence in the u. S. Versus miceli trial. Criminals byes of virtue of the fact that you have the evidence sticker on them. They are organized by the flights they were on, so this is a narrative about what happened and who did it. It is not a glorification of these individuals in their own right. We are not giving you their biographies, not telling you where they went to school, we are not celebrating them. As partresenting them of the narratives, as actors and the narrative. Thats a very different way of thinking about the presentation. I have to ask, obviously we get this in the news business. What do you say to people, you give them what they wanted . You gave them prominence. Well, it is in the context of a much larger exhibition. Years ago we tried to figure out the museum is 110,000 square feet. The historical exhibition is about 22 thousand square feet. This takes about 500 square feet. Part of thebig exhibition. It is in the context of telling the story. It is not a glorification. We all know who they are. Benot include them would like trying to tell the story of the holocaust without mentioning not cease. While that, because it is i have always told people it is important to remember, this was 6 million people, 3000 people didnt die and hurricane. It was a crime. Yet. I think the perpetrators was an issue for us. We took a slightly different approach. I think we have some pictures of the perpetrators. But, if you look at our exhibit, it was done with the same ,ell, let me start by saying the story of course has what we call, the characters, if you will. Theres obviously the victims, the perpetrators, people we used to call, bystanders, onlookers, then the heroes of our story by rescuers. This picture shows an early of people being humiliated for socalled, racist defilement. A relation relations between aryans and jews. The important part, your attention goes to the woman being humiliated and not days. But the most important people in this picture are the two women. The question is for these women, what are they thinking, they seem to be smiling. These are what we call, the onlookers. Frankly the raleighs the evil people in the world, victims in the world. Evil things happen mostly because of the onlookers. We all end up in that category sooner or later. Thats how we treat them. What someone once said, i created a museum for bystanders. That thread is there. Museum aboutdo a something that didnt happen. When you get to the victims, this is how most of the victims looking at Holocaust Museum. The people who created the museum were very concerned that our visitor would see these degraded, it may sit at skeletal people and not be able to identify with them because if you look at a picture such as the next one, that we have of hitlers loose look how happy , they look. We wanted our visitor to identify with the victims. We put the victims at the front of the story. We go to a lot of blank to show them before they become victims. What happened at the end is the perpetrators moved to the background and are not in the foreground. You have to search hard to find the perpetrators. You will find this picture is at the end of the exhibit. You have to look up. We have a few showing the perpetrators in their acts of humiliation. There has been a shift over the last 24 years. The exhibition when we opened said that the holocaust happened, and here is how it happened. Now as we want to be more relevant to younger generations for whom this might as well be the war of 1812, that will soon be your problem, we want to talk about why the holocaust happened. What made it possible . To do that, you have to bring these perpetrators out and talk about who they are and work. They were killers before nazism. Werent killers before nazism. We know a lot about the motivation for some of these killers. Some were true believers. Many did it for the most mundane reasons, like career advancement, greed, things like that. It is important to bring the perpetrator back. In a way, it will sound, not only to bring back some of their humanity, to remind ourselves that this is a museum about all of us. We all have potential along this spectrum of human figure. I have to ask, not three or four days go by that i dont get any mail from facebook, twitter, from a denier. People who deny the holocaust happened. People who think 9 11 wasnt real. To what degree do you consider your institutions a place where doubters can come and learn the truth . Is there any communication . Doubters is nice, i would call it euphemistic. I am speaking of the 15yearold kid. That is the person we want to reach. It is an inoculation program. Someone who says this is impossible. Someone susceptible to the deniers. There is a great book about holocaust deniers. These are not people interested in truth. These are antisemis. The question is how do we neutralize the question . The holocaust is probably the best documented crime in history. We have millions of pages written by the perpetrators bragging about how many jews they kill. That is not a problem. The problem is to get to young people early. This is important history. It is worth knowing about. It is relevant to you. The best antidote to denial is good education. Very much the same. We dont entertain dialogue with the 9 11 truther community. We tell the story and document what happened not just in objective ways through news reports, but inside. It is what human beings experienced on that day. When you go through the historical exhibitions, you dont get there until after you have been in this large almost be imagination huge scale exhibition. You understand the human toll of the event. You come into the story of 9 11. We take you moment by moment through the day. You are experiencing it as those of us who are alive on that day witnessed it either on television or on the streets of manhattan. You are having a sequence of emotions that are replicated in the way we tell this story. Sarah said something about relating, seeing yourself in the story. That is very much the way you engage audiences who say this has nothing to do with me. Suddenly, they feel the Human Emotion we all felt. It is very real, powerful, profound. You move through the events of the day. You come to a section that is about who did this and why. You come out into what we call 9 12, the world after 9 11. That is rooted in personal stories and experience. We take you through 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 here in maryland at the national did of science and Technology National institute of science and technology. The faa did work on what happened inside the planes. We present the evidence. There is no apology for. We are not trying to prove a point. We are saying this is what happened. We allow the exhibition to speak for itself. We knowledge that there are questions. We allow the exhibition to speak for itself. We knowledge that there are questions. People question the veracity of this story. We provide the Scientific Evidence to refute it. Could i get each of you to talk about what the architecture and use of space has suggested in each of your museums . How you would try to use that to make a statement and create a presence with people . I think we have some pictures of our architecture. Our architect, who was himself a refugee from nazi germany, wanted the architecture not to represent the holocaust but to evoke aspects of it. For him it was important that as you enter the building, you are being sent signals that the world is upside down. Civilization has fractured. You can see in the hall of witness upstairs some of that putting you off kilter. You see in the next photograph, i think we have a little bit of the industrial nature of the building. You can see he is actually it is hard to see, but on the righthand side of your screen the hvac system is somewhat exposed. If you look on the left, you can see this is the entrance to our exhibit. If you see the way the steel is used to grace the brick, he was inspired by places like auschwitz the way the crematoria were built. They were built up right and that of brick and steel. This is in his head evocative. We have one last one i want to show you. This grand staircase, which gradually narrows as it gets to the top, there he reminiscent of that Railroad Track leading to auschwitz. What is at the top . It is a window, but it is boarded up. If you look at that window through the slats, what do you see . The Washington Monument. You see this tension he is creating between the inside and outside. The other thing that is important is this magnificent skylight that covers the entire hall of witness. The holocaust happened in many ways in the light of day. We knew early. Everybody knew. He 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 sky, that sun is shining on me but also on people in the free world. They would see birds or butterflies and think about the freedom that happened had been denied them. I think memory itself is an intersection of cognitive understanding and emotional intelligence. When it is in a Memorial Museum, you are learning through the mind and the heart. The architecture becomes the visceral expression, much as it is here. It becomes the space in which you learn by feeling it. I mentioned the slurry wall. One thing that happened with this easy and being at the site of ground zero, it was eligible for landmark status. The project had received federal money, which was part of the appropriation that Congress Gave to rebuild all of Lower Manhattan. A portion came to the memorial and museum. Once you receive federal money, you are obligated to follow federal law. We fell under the landmark status eligibility the federal preservation act. We were required to make these remnants of structure that were still at the site meaningfully accessible visibly to the public. The only thing you can see something that is 70 feet below ground is to go 70 feet below ground. Our architects had a challenge of creating a space, building a building that you cannot see because it was belowground. The architects of the below grade space had to come up with an mechanism for conveying meaning in a nonbuilding. You are going into the bowels of the vacant World Trade Center. They allowed this environment that we were in to accentuate the Authentic Space while they inserted a way for us to move down that seven stories that was the architectural insertion. They chose a ramp. They could have put us in elevators. They wanted to do something that was tied to the site and also strategic in terms of the emotional aspect of the visitor. There was always a construction ramp at the World Trade Center when it was under construction. After 9 11, the road that went down to ground zero it was used to bring the debris out. It was the way that payment members and dignitaries would go down to ground zero to pay respects. They inserted a ramp that he walked down as you move that he walk down as you move into the space. You feel like you are processing toward something. It generates an attitude of reverence. As you move down, there are these periodic vistas that open in front of you. You get the sense of scale. You get a sense of the authentic. You are moving into this space before your ever told the story. There are hence about it. We begin with the voices of people around the world remembering where they were on 9 11. This was a global event. It is more about the physical environment that is actually conveying meaning in an effective affective way. You dont know what youre looking at. You know that it is big. You understand it is probably original. You dont fully get it. It is in a space called Foundation Hall. You will come back to Foundation Hall multiple times in your visit. When you come out of the historical exhibition, and the slurry wall that is 60 feet high by 60 feet wide, the portion that is exposed, on human scale it is overwhelming. It is a norm is. Enormous. The slurry wall has a story. When the buildings were standing, the lateral racing of the underground parking garage floors, which is where you are standing, that held the slurry wall in place. On 9 11, to 110 story buildings crashed into the site. Now what is holding it in place is the debris. The debris had to be removed. As recovery workers removed layers of debris, they had to reinforce this wall with anchors shot through the concrete into bedrock. There was evidence of cracking. That was found soon after the recovery effort began. Mayor giuliani was notified of this. It was not made public because the authorities did not want panic in an already panicked community. If they were breached, Lower Manhattan would have been inundated. Some like tunnels would have been flooded. They reinforced. At the end of the nine months, the wall held. When the architect who was the master site plan or for the rebuilding learns this story, in his proclivity to be metaphoric sees the wall as a physical metaphor of the strength, endurance, resilience of our nation and national values. When you are standing at the foot of the slurry wall when you 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. The meaning is multilayered. It is not just Foundation Hall because youre looking at foundational structure. It is Foundation Hall because you are at ground zero, but the balance has changed. It is not ground zero or something horrific has happened. It is ground zero from where you build up. That is the message of the museum. You are feeling it as much as knowing it. I think that is the role of the architecture. Lome called to the cards. If you could pass them out to the edges. Let me ask another question while the cards are being prepared. Each of your resumes as a role to play as a collector of artifacts. The word momentum is hardly momento hardly encompasses it. Can i get you each to talk about the role you have keeping collections that are available to the public and scholars . I would say that we talked a lot about sugar weinberg. He is the founding genius of this institution. He said this is not an object based museum. This is a storytelling is in. The objects me nothing outside of the context of the story. The objects, for example the barracks, the objects are authentic. They tell the story. They are meant to provide mood, environment, emotional power, authenticity at the same time. This is what we call this museum open case design. There is no case. In most museums you see objects in cases. It is fair to say, the shoe is pretty much a shoe unless youre seeing a shoe in this museum. You are familiar with our shoes. Another example of open case design. You dont need a text panel to explain what youre saying. Seeing. This goal of the education and emotional moment, this pacing that the journey puts you through. This is obviously one of those emotional moments. I think we have another picture of the railroad car, also an artifact. You walk through it. This is not typical of most museums. This is probably true for alice as well, 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. It has been used by the survivors documenting claims for compensation. Scott, you talked about denial. It plays a role in providing authentic evidence. It is also a memorial. It performs many roles. I want to tell you a little story about scholarship because it is fairly recent. One of our a scholar was here looking through some records from the stasi. You are member of the east German Secret Police remember the east German Secret Police. After the war, the communists held a lot of trials for the nazis. They found information on a woman, erna petri. It turns out her husband was in the ss. They went together to occupied poland. She started committing murders with them, including killing children. This evidence, she wrote a book on women in the ss. It is an extraordinary story. It was a finalist for the National Book award. 70 years after the holocaust, the collection is still helping us understand what happened. I will share a story about artifacts. As curators, artifacts are everything. They are the connection to another human being might have touched them or owned them. They are the palpable evidence of history. He felt strongly that artifacts are ok but they are secondary to be story. Over the years, this did not change. We have a beautiful storytelling museum. I remember one day saying, if there were a fire in the museum, what would you run and take out . He said, without hesitation, the ring gold milk can. He talked a good game, but this was a man who really got objects in a profound way. Our collections we had to build from scratch. We had the advantage of an extraordinary situation. The World Trade Center is owned by the Port Authority of new york and new jersey. They are not known for historic preservation. That is not they do. They manage bridges and tunnels and airports. Immediately after 9 11, the Port Authority had this prescience, this sense that this was a historic event that needed to be documented. They sent architects, engineers, and curators into the pile in the early weeks of the recovery and with spray paint cans identified pieces of steel that should be saved either because they could be used forensically or they could be used to tell the story. This is less than one half of 1 of the debris, and it filled and 80,000 square foot airline hangar at jfk. We had a next ordinary amount of material to choose from. It is also the basis of our collection. We went out and encouraged Family Members and the witnesses, survivors to contribute. We have built the collection over the years. It is for research, scholars, lending to other museums and organizations. We have loaned a piece of World Trade Center steel to nato headquarters in brussels. The power of that is that 9 11 was the first time in history that article five was invoked. Article five 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. Standing in front of the new headquarters in brussels this year will be a piece of World Trade Center steel. We share what we have. We learn from it. One of the areas that there needs to be much more documentation because the situation is becoming more acute is the matter of 9 11 related illness and the deaths that are occurring as the result of exposure to World Trade Center dust. There are going to probably be tens of thousands of fatalities as a result of that exposure. There are now thousands of people suffering from cancers. We are beginning to collect documentation, working with areas law firms that have worked in the litigation on this to document what has happened and what has been done to tell that story. Let me get to questions. We are apparently getting a lot of questions, 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 has made my wife and i very devoted to this museum is the idea that history does not stop in 1945 but has continued on with boston, rwanda, somalia. We could go on. Are you now expanding to questions about terrorism . Certainly, alice, what happened at 9 11 is seen as obviously a salvo in a struggle that continues. I would say terrorism, per se, is not within our mandate. However, genocide and crimes against humanity is. We had a center for the prevention of genocide and sent the granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors wanted to go into Northern Iraq to find refugees from isis, people who had survived isis to document to those crimes. She came back. She is a lawyer. She wrote up a report and made a determination that they had committed genocide. This led the state department and congress to agree with that finding. I would say, unfortunately, terrorism, extremism and genocide are converging these days, but that is where we would enter that topic. One of the great challenges of the 9 11 Memorial Museum was that we knew we had a story to tell that was specific to where we were located, a moment in time, but a story that was not over yet. Museums are find that spaces, but this is a story that was not finite. We had to figure out how to balance those realities. We focused on the events that happened at this site. We take you chronologically through the end of the recovery in 2002. The historical exhibition does not end there. It answers questions that we are still negotiating out of 9 11. Questions like in a world where terrorism is a real and present threat, how do democracies protect the homeland while law show ensuring the preservation and protection of Civil Liberties . We have not worked that out yet. These questions that cannot at this event have defined the post9 11 world and that opens up to 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 tight scape and every day, there are new stories on the wall that are related to what started in 2001. We are not a museum about preventing terrorism because we dont fundamentally believe that is possible. You can try your best and our agencies are doing that. They are trying hard to protect us. As Margaret Thatcher says, the terrorists only have to be right once. We have to be right every time. It is about being aware on the one hand of 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. In many respects, we are then 9 12 museum, as much as the 9 11 museum. Is there a limit as to how much you will pressure push your audience . Absolutely. We spent a years trying to figure out what would go into this museum and the debates were just so intense. We really had to think about what was appropriate to present the public space of a museum. 9 11 happened on the cusp of the beginning of the 21st century. We have access to extraordinary documentation. He had 911 calls, radio transmissions of firefighters in the building, cockpit voice recorders were you here the hijackers voices and intention. We made choices not to include material, even though it exists and you can find it on the internet. On youtube. Yes, but we felt we had an obligation to be respectful of the families of the victims and that the people we were there to commemorate. There were certain things that were offlimits that we would not include and it did not take away from our ability to tell the story. I would say that a big discussion along the way was to make sure you did not sentimentalize the history that you did not manipulate the visitor. There is nothing worse than a visitor who feels their emotions are being manipulated. The facts are so extraordinary, to tell them in the most basic, understated way, it was said, there will be notepad groups in the exhibition text. He is right. It is put out there what happened. We went to Great Lengths to minimize graphic imagery. In todays world, it looks almost silly. It was a big discussion. There are only three places you see difficult imagery. They are behind privacy walls. You see people using them here, but our goal is not to shock. It is to educate and to get people to think and ask questions and do Critical Thinking about their role in society. If you come out and say, oh, my god, people are so horrible to one another, if that is your answer, then we failed. That is not it is not the horror that is the message. It is that this happened in an advanced, question society, highly educated, with the democratic constitution, a role of law rule of law, and free press prayed that society went into collapse and genocide free press. That society went into collapse and genocide. We must documents it is important. Question for you, sarah, i understand the Memorial Museum is in the process of redesign or looks like a renewal of the permanent exhibit. Moved to talk about the new discover will you talk about the new discoveries that will be engaged . Yes, it is a revitalization. Their first motto is, do no harm, but it is old and one of the big things that happened was the followed the soviet union, access to millions of pages of archives and stories that did not really get there due in that exhibition. Our collection has grown dramatically. More importantly, we have been a lot of exhibitions and examined his why question and we want that to be incorporated great we did an exhibit because of the rise on the internet on nazi propaganda and the approach to their techniques and using the latest technology of their days. They would be all over social media today. They were earlier than everybody else to understand the power. Another example was an exhibit we did on cooperation and complicity, where we understand more about human motivation and we can tell a lot of simple stories about ordinary people who had choices to help or not help. This is an interesting picture. A local town, their neighbor, have been deported, their jewish neighbors, and what are they doing . They are at a public auction of their neighbors buying things cheaply. I have never seen that. You will have to come see this exhibition, scott. It is just down this hallway here. [laughter] we will begin with you, alice, but in your efforts to engage young people, how do do the role of Digital Education and technology within the museum . Young people these days are bored by step that is why theres old at times by staff that is live years old at times. The 9 11 story was the most digitally documented events of all time until now. We have hired the design team that brought media designers on board immediately, so we conceptualized the museum in terms of the application of available tools and innovation. I would have to say that people go to our museum and are focusing on technology, then we really missed mark. We use technology because its the best way to tell the stories , always in the service of storytelling. What youre looking at is an interface that is adjusting something known as the last column, a 36foot tall core column from the south tower that ended up being the 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. Before it was brought out of the sites, recovery workers signed their names, pasted missing posters, memorabilia, left messages here it it is like a totem of recovery. At the end of the recovery, and was cut down in a ceremony, laid on a flatbed truck covered with a shroud in an American Flag and it was 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 is coming together after 9 11. 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 and you can see things that are 36 feet above you you cannot see otherwise. It is an intimate engagement to it the inscriptions, and there are hotspots. You go to learn about the person who wrote it or the company they were with or unit they were with. It gives you access. I think the use of technology, if it is going to be effective, must be that it is the most potent way of telling your story. I will give one more example. That is we have an enormous number of oral histories of people who evacuated and escaped, 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 the most effective use of peoples time or effective way of telling the story. So as you move through the events of the day, there are audio alcoves in strategic moments. Inside these alcoves, you are able to literally hear the story of an evacuation but told by multiple people, each from their own perspective. There are snippets of oral histories interwoven in some cases with authentic archival recordings. You are using oral history in a completely new way. He completes it creates a narrative. We have one example of it, if we have time to share a snippet in one of the alcoves relating to the rescue, first responders. It is a firefighter named oreo palmer who did not survive on 9 11. We asked permission from his family. We did that routinely if we use actual recordings of people who died or were killed in the events. You were listening in that moment. I dont know if we can pull that up. You are looking at the towers, they are just wireframes and now youre going to hear this snippet of one of these audio experiences. [indiscernible] i have been compromised. 7374. We are coming up behind you. [indiscernible] we should be able to knock it down with two lines. [indiscernible] 78. We need to engines appear. We are on our way. That content is interspersed with the memories and recollections of people who were evacuating, the people who were going down as these guys were going up. You get a very immediate very , powerful sense of what that day was like, literally the inside story. That is where the media allows us to tell the story but you are not focused on the media, youre focused on the story. Yeah. Sarah . I do not want to follow that. I cannot even actually read the words. I could hear the tone of the voice and its quite amusing quite moving. My callous i am quite skeptical like alice i am quite , skeptical of technology. We are doing some experiments right now. Right now, we have an opportunity to do Virtual Reality for visitors and enter a destroyed city in syria. You actually tour the city and you can see the destruction perpetrated by the assad regime. We also have an opportunity, this is hard to tell what is happening, but that is a shipping container. This experiment is over now, but it was an opportunity to talk to somebody, a refugee, who had fled either syria or isis and they were either in germany or turkey in refugee camps, and talk in real time facetoface about their experience. There is a translator on the other end and this is a holocaust survivor talking to one of the survivors. It is not about the technology. We are trying to really humanize the experience of fleeing isis and what it is like to have survived that. I have two questions to conclude our time together. Both of you have been host to so many names we would recognize who have come to visit your museums. I am wondering who you remember. I bet it may not be some of the most recognizable names. I would say, first of all, the most important people who walk through our doors are young people. To see them interacting with survivors, that is the best feeling in the world and you think you have the best job in the world. We were visited do we remember i see some young people here washington was the murder capital of the world. Some of us remember that. We imported a new police chief from chicago named charles ramsey. I think we have a picture of chief ramsey here. He came in shortly after taking office to fix our city he came on a tour with david freeman, the head of our adl chapter. Chief ramsey came out of the exhibition and he said, i was deeply moved as a human being, but i was really taken aback as a police officer. I saw my own profession in your museums and i kept asking myself, how did my profession get on the walls of your museum . He had this idea it was his idea to create a Training Program for all recruits to the washington, d. C. Police force that would look at the slow of illusion of german policing from the democracy into the early stages of the nazi period and then into war and genocide. This program, which examines that evolution, is not just about their moral compass. It is about their professional ethics, their role in society, their relationship to the constitution. It became so popular, that the head of the fbi as to we could replicated for every fbi agent. So now we do it for fbi, military, the justiciary. It was because chief ramsey walked into this museum and had an idea about us that was bigger than we understood we were. Such a great story. As a jewish girl from long island, meeting the pope was pretty incredible. [laughter] that was just amazing. He is truly what you see is what you get. He is truly an extraordinary human being. [laughter] i bet he does know that. He probably does. We have had president s, the duke and duchess of cambridge. I have to tell you, the people who matter are not the ones whose names you necessarily know. Just a few weeks ago 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 exhibition. They can answer some of those tough questions that we and the historical exhibition with and engage with dialogue with other people who have answered those questions. Or you can just leave a message. A few weeks ago, and messages left by a young man. Jordan was his name, 18 years old, who had come to the museum on his birthday to stand in front of his mothers portrait in the memorial exhibition. We would not have known this. This was a woman who worked in the north tower and killed on that day. I did not know how he could do this but in the most composed way possible, he told us about his experience that day. He had come to our museum to spend his birthday with his mom. What he most wanted was for her to be proud of the man he had become. That to me is what this museum is here to do. It is a place of healing, a , placehere you can mourn we can recognize the best of yourself. Which is what was demonstrated after 9 11 in the face of the worst possible demonstration of but we can do as human beings, we saw the best. Jordan reminded me of that. That is the most memorable one right now for me. Im not sure i want to follow that with another question but we want to give maximum value here. There is so much Information Available online. There are so many people who do believe and do learn things electronically. Almost Virtual Reality, in fact. You have been dabbling with that here. What is the role of the museum in an age when many people think you can essentially sit in chairs like now and learn what you need to . And we are all pathetically dependent on those technologies, too. I think the museum will become more important as we go off in our echo chambers and live on our social media with likeminded opinions. To me, it is a place where you bring strangers together and they sometimes have a shared experience, but you create an experience, an environment, and you stimulate a new set of conversations. When i look at what is 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 you know and people you do not know. Especially difficult conversations. I think both of our institutions will play a bigger role in the civic life of this nation in the future. I totally agree with that. There are studies that have found that museums are at the top of the list of the most trustworthy places to learn. And i take that seriously. That people do not trust half of what they see online. For good reason. For good reason. Museums are the golden standard right now of places to learn. They are places of informal education, where it can be communally experienced. Talk to the person you are with, engaging conversation. It is trustworthy and we have an obligation to provide accurate history. But even more in a world where virtual is everywhere, encountering reality is really important. And there is nothing more real than the shoes in the Holocaust Museum. There is nothing more real than that boxcar. Theres nothing more real than the slurry wall. 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. I think the palpable reality one experiences in museums with all the media enhancements is that connection that you make to other human beings enter real human experience, human choices. That to me is the role of the museum. We want to thank you for being here. Both of these institutions have important and even more important than ever roles to play. In Uncertain Times and an uncertain future, look for elimination and moral compass at the same time. Thank you for joining us tonight. [applause] you are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation like us on facebook. Year cspan is touring cities across the country, explore and American History. Next a look at our recent visit to charlottesville, virginia