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 photograph