The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. has traveling exhibitions that tour the country in order to allow more people to learn about and understand what it was like to witness and experience the attempted genocide of European Jewry among other groups, referred to as the Holocaust. While traveling to Eugene, parts of the Holocaust Museum exhibit were lost. It is your job to create a new installation that can be part of the traveling exhibit for the duration of its stay in Eugene.
Terms such as "genocide" and "holocaust" come up often when discussing World War II, but where do they come from? Lets take a closer look before diving into the history of it all.
Seeking a word to help describe the horrific tragedies befalling thousands, as illustrated in the photo above, due to the Nazi policy of systematic murder, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer invented the word Genocide in 1944. "Geno-" comes from the Greek word meaning tribe or race and "-cide" is Latin for killing. A year later, in Nuremberg, Germany, the International Military Tribunal was held, where top Nazi's were charged with "crimes against humanity". Lemkin's term genocide was used in the trials to refer to the mass execution of a variety of groups. Three years later, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations approved a convention that made "genocide" an international crime to be prevented and punished. They legally defined genocide as:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
So genocide is a term used to describe what occurred during the holocaust, but what does "holocaust" even mean? In Greek, "to sacrifice by fire", which is exactly what the Nazi officers did.
This man is burning a corpse, which was a common way of "disposing" of people after they were murdered in numerous different ways.
To get a more in depth view of what the Holocaust was, you are going to research it by exploring several websites with questions to guide you in your hunt for knowledge.
Information from this page can be found on the following website. If you are interested in following up on anything you read here, please explore it further: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/