20 truckloads of exhibits arrive and installation begins at new Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

When the Dallas Holocaust Museum opens in its new location — across the street from its current location in the West End — on Sept. 17, it will become known as the Dallas Holocaust and Human Right Museum.

Museum Board Chair Frank Risch said the new museum will include exhibits on 10 major genocides in addition to the Holocaust. The human rights part of the galleries will focus on slavery, child labor, women’s rights, LGBT rights and more.

Genocides from around the world will be covered by exhibits, including Stalin taking food from the Ukraine so Russians could eat while Ukrainians starved to death and the U.S. government wiping out an American Indian tribe in South Texas.

Exhibits are being installed in the new Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.

The goal of teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is to wipe out hate, Risch explained.

“You only need to know five [Dallas police] officers were shot and killed a few blocks from [the museum’s new location] to understand the hate,” he said. “Take lessons we’ve learned — or not learned — and apply them to what’s going on today.”

One new focus for the museum will be a presentation on the Nuremburg trials. Risch said those trials were the first time in history that war criminals were brought to trial rather than simply being declared guilty and executed. The lasting effect was the beginning of what we understand as international law.

The new museum is the third location for the Holocaust Museum, which began in 1984 in the basement of the Jewish Community Center in North Dallas. At the time, it was one of the first Holocaust museums in the country.

In 2005, the museum was renamed Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education & Tolerance and was moved into an old warehouse building across the street from the old Dallas Schoolbook Depository in the West End.

The current museum has only 6,000 square feet of exhibit space. Because of limited space, the exhibit concentrated on three events that took place during the Holocaust on one day — April 19, 1943. Using many artifacts and pictures from Dallas residents who survived the Holocaust, the current museum tells the story of the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, the attack on a transport train from

Museum CEO Mary Pat Higgins stands in the boxcar explaining its restoration. (David Taffet/Dallas Voice)

Belgium and the Bermuda Conference where world leaders met and decided to play golf rather hold the planned talks on the Holocaust.

Most of the exhibits in the new 55,000-square-foot museum are new, and they began arriving by truck this week. One centerpiece of the new museum will be a floor-to-ceiling replica of the Brandenburg Gate draped in Nazi flags, just as it was during World War II. That was part of the first of seven 20-ton shipments from Pacific Studio, a Seattle-based exhibits creator.

One major exhibit that has been with the museum since it opened in 1984 — a Belgian boxcar — has already been moved to the new building.

The boxcar was built in Germany and given to Belgium as reparations after World War I. The Dallas Holocaust Museum was the first museum in the U.S. to have a Nazi transport boxcar in its collection.

To fit in its original space, part of the boxcar was disassembled. In that space, all visitors entered the museum by walking through the train.

The boxcar was reconfigured in the current museum. As DART passed by right outside the creaky old building, the sound of the modern light rail cars gave an eerie impression of the sound of trains in motion, transporting people to their deaths in the concentration camps, as visitors walked through.

Now, the boxcar has been moved into place on the third floor of the new museum and is currently being restored to its original size.

Holocaust Museum President and CEO Mary Pat Higgins said pieces of the train that weren’t used in the original exhibit have been in storage.

“It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” she said of the reconstruction effort.

But some of the original pieces were missing. So the restorer found a hundred-year-old barn made of wood of the same vintage as the boxcar. Planks from that barn are being used to fill in gaps where original pieces were missing.

The new museum’s focus on human rights will include exhibits on LGBT equality, and Higgins said special programming will include LGBT topics. She said she hopes Jim Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that resulted in marriage equality, and plaintiffs in the Texas marriage equality lawsuit would be available for one of those presentations.

The partnership between the museum and the local LGBT community goes back almost a decade to when members of Westboro Baptist Church came to Dallas to picket both the museum and Congregation Beth El Binah, Dallas’ primarily LGBT Jewish congregation.

While staff at the museum were quite apprehensive about the visit and warned Holocaust survivors in Dallas to avoid the area that day, the mostly LGBT synagogue took the visit as a challenge. They rallied about 200 counter-protestors that showed up outside the museum with a variety of signs bearing stupid slogans to counter the bigoted signs from the right-wing religious group from Kansas.

Westboro’s protesters stayed about 15 minutes. The museum gained more new members on that day than they had ever before signed up in one day, as the line to get into the museum wrapped around the building after Westboro left.

The museum and Beth El Binah later joined forces again to bring in a traveling exhibition created by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. entitled “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945.”

Higgins said she was delighted with the change removing “tolerance” from the museum’s name, because she believes we can do better than simply tolerating each other. With the new museum’s focus on human rights, Higgins said she hopes the partnership between the LGBT community and the new museum will grow.