40 Fun Facts About United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Which world religious leader was the first visitor when the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to the public in 1993?

The Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism, walked in on April 26, 1993, four days after the dedication ceremony.

Since 1993, Holocaust Memorial Museum visitors have been handed what that tells one real person's story?

An identification card profiling a real victim or survivor of the Holocaust has gone to visitors at the elevators to the main exhibition. The same profiles appear in the museum's online encyclopedia.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum's street address honors which diplomat who shielded thousands of Jews in Budapest in 1944?

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish envoy, issued protective passports in Budapest, and the stretch of 15th Street beside the museum was renamed Raoul Wallenberg Place in his memory.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum stands on federal land, but who supplied the nearly $190 million to build and fill it?

Private donors paid for the building, the artifacts and the exhibitions, while the federal government contributed the 1.9-acre site beside the Washington Monument.

Which survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner was founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Elie Wiesel chaired the presidential commission that proposed the museum in 1979, then led its council until 1986, the year he won the Nobel.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum opens every day of the year except Christmas Day and which Jewish holy day?

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is one of only two days a year when the museum shuts. On every other day it is open and admission is free.

Four brick structures with pyramid roofs on the Holocaust Memorial Museum's north side echo which feature of Nazi camps?

Watchtowers are what the roofline recalls: from one angle the north walls show the profile of camp guard posts, a procession of sentry boxes hidden in an ordinary-looking facade.

Which Nobel Peace laureate lost the Holocaust Memorial Museum's highest honor in 2018 over attacks on the Rohingya?

Aung San Suu Kyi had been given the award in 2012. The museum revoked it on March 6, 2018, and published its letter to her explaining the decision.

A Holocaust Memorial Museum show on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion spotlighted which American carmaker?

Henry Ford spread the forgery through his own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, a story told in the museum's 2006 exhibition A Dangerous Lie.

Which US president set up the 1978 commission that recommended a national Holocaust memorial museum in Washington?

Jimmy Carter signed the order on November 1, 1978, and the commission handed him its report in the Rose Garden less than a year later.

Which US president spoke at the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 1993, three months into his term?

Bill Clinton spoke on April 22, 1993, four days before the doors opened to the public. The council chairman, Harvey Meyerhoff, also addressed the crowd.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum was designed by a partner in the New York firm of which famous architect?

I. M. Pei, who gave the Louvre its glass pyramid, had worked with the museum's architect since 1956.

Daniel's Story, the Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibition for children, is told mainly through which kind of text?

Diary entries by a boy named Daniel guide families through the rooms. His words are based on the wartime writings of real young people and on the memories of some who survived.

At the US Holocaust museum, slits in the Hall of Remembrance frame the Washington Monument and which other landmark?

Jefferson Memorial views come only in slivers: narrow gaps in the side walls let in daylight and partial glimpses of the monuments outside.

Which Metro station, one block east of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the nearest stop for visitors?

Smithsonian station, on the Orange, Blue and Silver lines, is the closest stop, which matters because the museum has no public parking of its own.

Chaim Herzog spoke at the 1993 dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum as the president of which country?

Israel's president Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast, spoke in the final weeks of his ten years in office.

Which congressman, one of the Big Six civil rights leaders, received the Holocaust Memorial Museum's top honor in 2016?

John Lewis was honored for standing up to hatred and enduring beatings without ever abandoning his commitment to the dignity of all people.

The Hall of Remembrance, the Holocaust Memorial Museum's space for quiet reflection, is built in which shape?

A hexagon of six walls joined by open corners forms the hall, so that from outside each wall reads like a freestanding tablet.

For a Holocaust Memorial Museum installation, Anton Kusters photographed what at the sites of 1,078 former Nazi camps?

The sky overhead was his subject at every site, shot between 2012 and 2017. Each print is stamped with the camp's GPS coordinates and its number of victims.

Which rusty container, long shown at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, once hid part of the Warsaw ghetto's secret archive?

A milk can held part of the Oneg Shabbat archive, the record of ghetto life that Emanuel Ringelblum's group buried as the deportations to Treblinka gathered pace.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, honored by a plaque at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, was killed in 2009 doing which job there?

Special police officer Stephen Tyrone Johns was shot by a white supremacist for whom he had just opened the door. The museum now runs a youth leadership program in his name.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum's original main exhibition opens with 1945 camp photographs taken by which Allied force?

The US Army took the pictures as its troops reached the camps, scenes that shocked even battle-hardened soldiers and told the world what Nazism had done.

Three sides of the Holocaust Memorial Museum are clad in which stone, the staple of official Washington buildings?

Limestone makes the exterior seem benign and at home in official Washington. The architect said visitors pass through that stone screen to enter a concrete world.

In October 1988, President Ronald Reagan took part in which milestone for the future Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Laying the cornerstone came eight years after Congress voted to create the museum, and more than four years before the finished building welcomed its first visitors.

The main staircase in the Holocaust Memorial Museum's central hall narrows toward the top to evoke which sight?

Receding rail tracks heading to a camp are what the narrowing steps suggest, one of many design details meant to tell visitors that something is amiss.

What was notable about the 1980 vote in Congress that established the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?

It was unanimous, and the government followed it by making federal land beside the Washington Monument available for the building.

Visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum's Hall of Remembrance are invited to perform which simple act of mourning?

Visitors may light a candle, a symbol of renewed life in many cultures, beneath walls inscribed with the names of concentration and death camps.

The Höcker Album, a 2007 gift to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, shows SS men relaxing while posted at which camp?

Auschwitz officers fill the album's 116 photographs, some taken at an SS retreat near the camp. An American officer found it in a Frankfurt apartment in 1945 and kept it for six decades.

Holocaust Memorial Museum researchers cataloguing every Nazi camp and ghetto in Europe documented how many sites?

About 42,500 ghettos and camps were documented for the museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, a multi-volume project that its researchers began in 2000.

Which once-secret US intelligence unit of World War II received the Holocaust Memorial Museum's top honor in 2022?

The Ritchie Boys included many Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis and then returned to Europe in uniform, using their German to interrogate prisoners on the front lines.

Which American sculptor made Gravity, the 30-ton steel slab wedged into a staircase at the Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Richard Serra's 12-foot slab cuts into the steps so that descending visitors must split up to pass it, a forced separation.

Loss and Regeneration, a bronze on the Holocaust Memorial Museum's plaza, shows which structure tipped onto its roof?

A house upended on its roof stands about 100 feet from a tall, tree-like figure. Sculptor Joel Shapiro meant the pair as a memorial to the children who died.

What is the name of the three-story, glass-roofed gathering space on the first floor of the Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Hall of Witness is the name, and visitors from 14th Street reach it by crossing a raw steel platform, a threshold meant to cut them off from the world outside.

Which architect, who fled the Nazis as a nine-year-old in 1939, designed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?

James Ingo Freed, born in Essen, toured camps and ghettos before designing a building that he called a resonator of memory.

Which book of the Bible is quoted behind the eternal flame in the Holocaust Memorial Museum's Hall of Remembrance?

Deuteronomy provides the passage, a command never to forget what one's own eyes have seen and to make it known to one's children and grandchildren.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum's collections are housed at the Shapell Center, a conservation facility in which state?

Maryland's city of Bowie is home to the center, where conservators treat fragile paper, photographs and textiles, many of them objects that were never meant to last.

The long-lost journal of which Nazi ideologue, recovered in 2013, now belongs to the Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Alfred Rosenberg's loose-leaf diary vanished after being used as evidence at Nuremberg and was recovered in Lewiston, New York, in 2013.

Which German chancellor received the Holocaust Memorial Museum's highest honor in 2017 for defending Holocaust memory?

Angela Merkel, then in her twelfth year leading Germany, was honored for an unwavering commitment to Holocaust memory and education.

Which Syrian volunteer rescue group, known by a nickname, shared the Holocaust Memorial Museum's highest honor in 2019?

The White Helmets, formally Syria Civil Defence, are volunteers who save lives at great risk to themselves. They shared the 2019 award with Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative was built with which mapping program?

Google Earth layers let the museum share and visually present information on emerging crises that could lead to mass atrocities.