courtesy of St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum
About six weeks before the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum reopens in Creve Coeur following a $25 million expansion, an audio-visual worker is testing one of the installations in the main exhibit space. The projection is a black-and-white photo of Dr. Gustav Schonfeld as a child. Schonfeld survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and Mühldorf before American soldiers liberated that last camp in 1945. After the war ended, he settled in St. Louis, earned a medical degree from Washington University, and worked at the school for more than 30 years. In the photo, he’s surrounded by a group of his Hebrew school classmates. Museum staff aren’t sure what happened to the other children in the photograph, but statistically, it’s unlikely that any of them survived. It’s a picture that encapsulates the museum’s mission: Remember the Jews who died in the Holocaust as well as the ones who survived and made new lives in St. Louis. But the museum also wants visitors to learn the history of the Holocaust so they can recognize and reject hatred today, and with the expansion, its staff members are planning new ways to support that aim.
courtesy of St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum
Once a division of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, the Kaplan Feldman is spinning off into its own 501(c)(3) so that it can focus on operations—the 35,000-square-foot building will triple the museum’s size. Before the renovation, the museum saw 20,000–30,000 visitors each year. After it reopens, its staff is hoping to double that, with 20,000–30,000 being students. To enrich their experience, they created an Impact Lab, where visitors can consider contemporary topics such as hate crimes through the lens of the Holocaust and actually practice how they would respond to examples of bigotry and prejudice. “There’s one area where we talk about how to go from being a bystander to an active ally, someone who stands up in some way to fight the prejudice or hatred,” says Amy Lutz, a marketing and communications manager for the museum who has completed research on Holocaust rescue and resistance. “It’s an area to challenge all of us to think about how we might respond. It’s meant for all of us to examine ourselves and how we interact with the world and other people.” The museum received $1 million from the Tilles Foundation to support the lab.
COMING SOON
The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum reopens November 2.
The Kaplan Feldman is one of a handful of Holocaust museums that participates in the Law Enforcement & Society program, which teaches law enforcement officials about how different police responded during the Holocaust and how to apply those lessons in their work today. The museum is hoping to expand that program to different professional groups. And though the core of its work focuses on the Holocaust, the museum also wants to dip into programming about contemporary issues, such as China’s treatment of Uyghurs.
As for the main exhibit, visitors enter through a room that looks like it’s been covered in damask wallpaper. It’s decorated with prewar family photos that show the vibrancy and diversity of Jewish life. From there, galleries focus on the history of antisemitism before the Holocaust, the history of the Holocaust, choices people made during the genocide, and survivors. The museum doesn’t shy away from showing graphic imagery, but the worst photos are stored in drawers—guests can open them to view if they choose.
The Kaplan Feldman hopes that the new building will help boost its number of visitors from out of state, but it doesn’t want to disregard the St. Louis piece of the story, either. More than 800 Holocaust survivors called St. Louis home, and their names will be projected on a wall in the new museum. The stories are powerful. For her research, Lutz studied a rescuer and Swiss diplomat named Carl Lutz (no relation). Carl Lutz saved 62,000 Jews from the Nazis during World War II and lived in St. Louis briefly.
“Change begins with us—not necessarily the museum, but St. Louis,” Amy Lutz says. “We want to empower people to take what they learn here and change the community and the region.”
MORE TO KNOW
DOC TALK
A NEW KEN BURNS FILM LOOKS AT THE HOLOCAUST—AND WHAT THE U.S. DID AND DIDN’T KNOW.
In the lead-up to the premiere of The U.S. and the Holocaust, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, “I will not work on a more important film than this one in my lifetime.” Using first-person accounts, Burns examines what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it happened, looks at how they responded, and reveals a story deeper than either ignorance or indifference.
“While we rightly celebrate American ideals of democracy and our history as a nation of immigrants, we must also grapple with the fact that American institutions and policies, like segregation and the brutal treatment of Indigenous populations, were influential in Hitler’s Germany,” Burns said before the documentary aired on PBS.
There is a St. Louis connection in the documentary, too. Günther “Guy” Stern, who grew up in Germany, and went to live with an uncle in St. Louis to escape the Nazis, makes an appearance. Stern, who is now 100, attended Saint Louis University before he was drafted into the Army and became a member of the Ritchie Boys unit that interrogated German prisoners of war. You can read more about his life in his memoir, Invisible Ink.
STREAM THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST AT NINEPBS.ORG/PASSPORT.
