The Holocaust Memorial Center – Farmington Hills, Michigan. Located on Orchard Lake Road, just a short drive from I-696. Admission is $8 if you are not a member.
Here is a great comment by the museums director:
I just want to thank dFUNK and its readers for the attention to the recent graffiti at the Packard plant and the responses to the photos about our center. Yes, the architecture is strident, but the story of this watershed event in human history must be remembered. Genocide continues today and we can see and hear it on the nightly news.
The award winning building houses an unmatched educational opportunity available to all. Please come and visit.
Stephen Goldman
No photography inside the museum, but the idea is for people to go check it out themselves. It is made to be an immersive experience so photography really wouldn’t be properly descriptive.
The exterior of the museum was constructed to both look like a concentration camp, and also be symbolic of the prisoner’s experience. The gray and blue stripes are from the camp uniforms.
The interior of the museum guides you through centuries of information about antisemitism, and then begins to take you step by step through the dark years of the Holocaust.
As you proceed further into the story, lighting and ambiance changes to reflect the intensity of what you are viewing. By the time you get to the Allied liberation films of the camps, you are standing in pitch black surrounded by nothing but the images and people around you.
These types of museums can offer a very difficult experience for a lot of people, the information is very hard to process, and especially when you get so much shown to you at one time. I have the same issues when I go to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. But there are times when this is so necessary, and there is no more appropriate way to deal with these kinds of historical events. So definitely go – but be prepared to experience something. Something pretty damn heavy.
I used to drive by this museum and think that its exterior design was simply too intense, to raw and in your face for street level. You know, save that stuff for inside the museum, do we all really need to live with it every day ? Well after recent experiences I am realizing all too clearly that this building is exactly what it needs to be, and yes…we need to be reminded as often as is necessary.
It is NOT time to “get over it”.
Holocaust Memorial Center
Zekelman Family Campus
28123 Orchard Lake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48334-3738
Sunday – Thursday
9:30 AM – 5:00 PM
(Last admission at 3:30 PM)
Friday
9:30 AM – 3:00 PM
(Last admission at 1:30 PM)
Closed on Saturday
We are closed on Jewish holidays and most legal holidays.
Docent Guided Public Tours
– Sunday – Friday 1:00 PM
– Last approximately 2 hours
Unique Dollhouse Rooms And Furniture Materials
It would be much appreciated if Mr. Goldman could call me sometime or e-mail me a phone number where I could contact him. I do believe we share a mirror experience as the one that recently took place at the Packard plant. I personally witnessed the individual responsible for posting and distributing that very same message in an automobile factory not too far away. Thanks, Jeff
Equal opportunity paranoia & hate. Herr Hitler had to be the world’s greatest salesman because if one looks at him and then the Aryan ideal the two images just don’t compute. How in the hell did he pull that one off?
The building was a movie theater in the 70s and 80s. I saw Blade Runner and Alien when they first came out.
Old Skool – also in that list are Johvah’s Witnesses. The Nazis were all about pure paranoia.
The historian in me would be interested in seeing some of these sites. The human in me would be terrified at what I might feel. As you note it wasn’t only Jews who were exterminated. Anyone who was outside the ideal was a possible victim. The Roma were targeted as were Homosexuals, intelligentsia of varying stripes and others that didn’t measure up somehow such as Individuals with Down’s Syndrome and other afflictions.
Yeah, but if you happen to be Polish (most of my family is polish) it starts to creep into your family history and your family tree whether you like it or not. Of course it affects Jewish people, but there are many other groups that were swept up in the process or singled out early on in the conflict, such as the Russian soldiers and Polish intellectuals and political prisoners who inhabited the original Auschwitz, before it expanded to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In recent years they have found several mass graves of these Polish intellectuals in Poland (as well as other groups – like German citizens).
When you go to read about your nationality, and find that almost all the great minds of your culture were hunted down and exterminated in recent history….well that is a mind blower, which makes it very hard for me not to keep studying about it. I cant comprehend what this would be like for Jewish people, where the process was so vast and huge and all about getting rid of them. They put the process on an assembly line model – it was just insane. Yep, there have been other genocides, and some with more people. But the Holocaust ranks alone for the disturbing process that was developed, and the startling efficiency with which it operated at its peak. 1.1 million humans destroyed in the Auschwitz camp system.
I dont know if I could go to Auschwitz or the other camps or not. I mean, how haunted is that ground ?? I have friends who have gone and who have walked under those gates. What they describe is something like taking a little peak into hell.
wow, that first pic!! damn!
i dont think i could ever go to a museum like this, or especially to the actual death camps that are preserved over in Poland. wayyyy too heavy for me. i know enough of what happened there; i dont want to learn more.
*shudder*
Thank you Mr. Goldman for stopping by to leave that comment, much appreciated ! This post is intended as an open invitation for readers to come check out this powerful museum. Especially to any of you who may not have understood the negative reaction to the sign that was hung at Packard.
I just want to thank dFUNK and its readers for the attention to the recent graffiti at the Packard plant and the responses to the photos about our center. Yes, the architecture is strident, but the story of this watershed event in human history must be remembered. Genocide continues today and we can see and hear it on the nightly news.
The award winning building houses an unmatched educational opportunity available to all. Please come and visit.
Stephen Goldman
Very interesting structure and fine work by a local architectural firm. Was in Architecural Record back in 2004.
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/040421holocaust.asp
I aim to go visit sometime in March, when I’ll have a car for a little while. Maybe the guy on DetroitYes who wrote that the Holocaust is an “old grudge” ought to go, too.
I had the opportunity to visit Jerusalem a couple of times in my early twenties. One of the places I visited was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. At that point in my life I was not ready for the experience. To say it was intense is an understatement. I really did not confront the Final Solution until years later when I took a class in the Holocaust as part of my undergraduate studies at the University of North Florida. My research paper was on the system that supplied the materials such as ovens and gas chambers to the various camps. To those who suggest that the Holocaust was a hoax or not as bad as advertised I would suggest that a little research would work wonders. The system that was put in place to exterminate our fellow human beings boggles the mind. And all this done by the society that gave the world Beethoven, Bach and Kant. With the right stimulus genocide of this sort could happen anywhere. This was just the most extreme version. Work did not set these poor people free, it destroyed them. That is why it is up to those of us with a voice to stand up for the victims of Wounded Knee, Armenia and Cambodia among other places of intolerance.