The Melbourne Holocaust Museum

I was amazed, no ifs or buts. And as a curator from the field, I can say that I have never seen anything like this.

The museum opened its doors in November 2023. Three compact, permanent and very different exhibitions are the core of the new or completely renovated museum.

I was particularly blown away by the exhibitions about hidden children, which are tailored to young visitors.

The exhibition can only be visited with a 'facilitator', a kind of presenter or guide, and as a group, so the visitor experience is very different than in a classic permanent exhibition.

Something very different - and at least I have never seen anything like it in this form before - a twenty-minute virtual reality implementation of a visit by a Holocaust survivor from Melbourne back to his home in Poland and the places of persecution. The visitor not only travels to Europe with the contemporary witness, but also to the former ghetto in Łódź, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The exhibition is called “Walk with me” in the sense: Come with me/Walk with me.

It's about what these places look like today and what John Shiya Chaskiel remembers and tells about certain places. He takes the visitor with him. The latter in the truest sense of the word.

I admit, I was very skeptical at first, especially after I saw something like this for the first time in 2019 in the Second World War Museum in Gdańsk/Gdańsk, so to speak. At that time in Gdańsk it was about the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and the visitor was no longer a visitor, but a Polish resistance fighter. I was deeply shocked by the implementation in Gdańsk; I found the narrative to be strongly Polish-nationalist and, above all, brutal. The scenes were so manipulative that by the end I thought I was leaving the museum and fighting. It took me a long time to get over it.

But back to Melbourne or better with VR glasses then to Poland, with the Holocaust survivor from Melbourne. The recordings were taken over 9 years ago (!), sometimes you notice that some of the recordings look a bit old, but this is still a great experience and visitor's perspective.

And I'm very excited.

Since the full 20 minutes remain in the present day with the exception of a few historical photos that are shown and also end in St. Kilda in Melbourne, the film is very informative and emotional and present, but not overwhelming and manipulative (like in Gdańsk...). Therefore: definitely watch it - and there should be more talk about it in Europe.

Find out more here: https://mhm.org.au/walk-with-me-a-virtual-reality-film/

The permanent exhibition itself is compact and I liked it. The curators explicitly made sure to take as much material from their own collection as possible and tailor it to Melbourne as much as possible. You can follow survivors and “walk in the shoes” of a person at video stations,

In some places there are questions about the activation of the visitor, the so-called “dilemma boxes”

and in many places mirrors remind visitors that they are part of this history. That the topic has to do with today.

I am very enthusiastic and impressed, also because I had some of the ideas implemented here for projects in Germany, but some of them fell on deaf ears. I've been wondering why (for a while) - and then decided to think that maybe I'm in the right place.