Holocaust Museum

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM reframes the captions of holocaust photographs from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. These captions—without their photographic images—are arranged loosely in the order or narrative constructed by the museum. There are many purposes to this project, but, for the author, the genesis is in articulating a cultural shift from image to text. Primarily, the author chose this particular subject, this particular holocaust, because the images are shared in our collective memory—by presenting only the text, the reader is, hopefully, consigned into a more complicit experience.

"According to a dictionary, a museum is a site where objects of permanent value are kept and displayed. The permanent value of the objects captured in Robert Fitterman's HOLOCAUST MUSEUM is that they prove the cut an image can make. The image of a Jew, a gypsy, a desecration, a desire. We have seen the pictures of our past, but the point is the caption. For it is through the language of this museum that we can see how permanent, how precious, is our love of hate."—Vanessa Place