I’m now officially an intern in the Division of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Museum. I started work on Monday, and so far so good. I haven’t really done a lot yet to be honest, but I think I will like my work. Since most of you don’t really know what I’m doing, I’ll give you a brief description of my department. The Division of the Senior Historian (DSH from here on out) consists of three full-time staff members, an Austrian intern here on Gedenkdienst (an alternative to mandatory military service), two volunteers each who come in once a week, and myself. The DSH is contained within the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and we, along with the library, are located on the fifth floor of the museum building. Our division has three main responsibilities:
1. Answer any questions posed to us by the general public concerning the Holocaust and related events. In a way, we’re like one of those numbers you call and can ask the person who answers any questions and they get back to you with the answer, except our questions are restricted to the subject area of the Holocaust. In short, the people in this department know a whole heck of a lot about the Holocaust. The range of questions goes from very detail-oriented, exacting questions posed by scholars to mid-range questions posed by the media and other people with a fairly strong interest in the material to absolutely ridiculous questions from who knows who, like the one I saw in the log yesterday which asked, “Did Hitler have cats? If so what were there names?”. The only questions we don’t answer are those about what happened to specific Holocaust victims (these are referred to the Survivor Registry people), those that are looking for basic info on reference materials for a paper they are doing (those are referred to the Library), and those which come from deniers (those go unacknowledged as required by museum policy).
2. Ensure that all materials, which originate from the museum or are displayed in the museum, are historically accurate. This means we work with Education, Exhibits, Publications, etc. to fact-check and help create new materials. We also review any book that appears in the museum shop and any video that is shown in the museum.
3. Produce original research on the Holocaust. Each of the three full-time members of the DSH are specialists in specific fields, and they publish research, give speeches, attend conferences, and act as academics. When I’m not doing items 1 & 2, I have been given the task of researching and producing a position paper on the number of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) killed in the Holocaust. Currently estimates range anywhere between 90,000 and 1.5 million, and the USHMM would like to have a more accurate number than that to give as an estimate. So I’ll be spending a lot of time in the Library looking through records (many of which have just become available in the past years as formerly closed countries have opened and begun to allow access to their records) and reading the latest literature. I think it sounds interesting, and it should help me decide if I really do want to pursue a graduate degree in history.
So that’s it. Yes, not so brief, but that really is just the overview. I’ve spent most of my time so far just getting to know the place and the people. Everyone I’ve met has been fabulously nice, and I think it will be a good place to work. I’ll let you know more after I’ve been here a while.
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