Magazine - summer 03 - St. John's College

{Culture and Context}
21
“The Nazis tried to wipe them out. The registry
brings them back.”
Stephen Vitto, A85
“The building itself is an artifact,” he says. “It’s made of the brick
and steel of industrialization, with jagged lines of lights. There’s a
lot of gray and black and an emphasis on poignant photographs.
There are false doors, some parts are dark, some are cramped. Its
layout is meant to be confusing, to give you some sense for the experience
of the Holocaust: once the knock on the door came, people
didn’t know what was going to happen to them.”
The Holocaust Museum is an exemplary work of museum craft,
says Murphy. “You hate to say it’s your favorite museum, because of
the subject matter, but in terms of a museum that gets its point
across, the Holocaust Museum is the finest museum that I’ve ever
been to. It tells the story without devolving into mere voyeurism. It
involves you from the minute you walk into the door. The skill of the
people who put that together is unbelievable.”
Vitto considers himself
fortunate to have witnessed
that skill first-hand. He
began working at the Holocaust
Museum three years
before there was a Holocaust
Museum, after answering an
ad at George Washington
University (where he was
working on a master’s degree
in history) for entry-level
library work. At the beginning,
he did a lot of cataloguing
and answered reference
questions. Early on, he says,
the library staff was uncertain
of how the collections
would be used: by historians?
scholars? for personal
research? As library use
grew, they learned that about
90 percent of visitors were
survivors and their families,
a group that often formed
lines of 20 to 30 people at the
reference desk looking for
personal information.
By the time the library
opened in April 1993, Vitto
and a colleague had developed
an expertise in finding
historical information particular
to the needs of survivors.
Vitto, for instance,
gary pierpoint
developed a reading knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish, German,
and all Slavic languages. As the librarians learned to find their
way around ghetto lists, transports, and work details, they began
to focus their work on building a survivors’ registry, using as
their foundation a registry started in 1981 as a project of the
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Today, the registry database contains information on approximately
180,000 Holocaust survivors and their family members
worldwide and handles 34,000 requests annually. Vitto’s work
at the museum is what he describes as a perfect mix of researching
documents for the registry and working with survivors and
their families. He talks about the registry’s relationship to one
of the museum’s most poignant exhibits, the Tower of Faces.
This three-story tall exhibition shows 1,500 photographs taken
over a 50-year period in
Ejszyszki, a shtetl in Lithuania.
The photographs capture
the everyday lives of
Ejszyszki’s 4,000 Jews
before the Holocaust, with
pictures from weddings and
family reunions, school and
the beach, graduations and
bar mitzvahs. On two days in
September 1941, all but 29 of
the 4,000 Ejszyszki Jews
were killed by German death
squads.
For Vitto, the photographs
run seamlessly into his work
with the registry and explain
why he finds his work so
fulfilling. “This is completely
what my work is about,” he
says. “The Nazis tried to wipe
them out. The registry brings
them back.” x
At the Holocaust Museum,
Steven Vitto has a daily
reminder of the importance
of his work: the faces of
Jews from a shtetl in
Lithuania where all but
29 of the 4,000 Jews were
killed by German death
squads in 1941.
{ The College • St. John’s College • Fall 2004 }