A Time of Transformation
As the world becomes increasingly complex, memorial museums can help people navigate uncertainty.
Greenwald, Alice M. "A Time of Transformation." Museum Magazine, May—June 2023, pp. 14+. aam.us.org
Image courtesy of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum
Despite the inescapable reality of a world continuously reeling from tragic events, unthinkable loss of life, and the erosion of democratic values, we hold fast to centuries-old traditions of hope and redemption. Is our commitment to these aspirations a manifestation of custom and habit, or does remembrance enable us to navigate the disorientation caused by profound change?
Having spent my career as a practitioner of remembrance, this question is at the heart of the work to which I have dedicated the majority of my professional life. I served 19 years at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and 16 years—first as founding Museum Director and later as President and CEO—at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, from which I have recently retired.
As the end of my tenure approached, I found myself reflecting on what it takes to respond to change—not only the personal change that retirement triggers, but the profound disruptions and unexpected changes that are the constant backdrop of our lives, whether pandemics, unprovoked wars, disastrous weather events, or judicial reversals of established rights.
How should we respond to our changing world? What does it mean to be a leader in a time of transformation? How do you help people deal with the unexpected?
The Healing Power of Memorial Museums
We are living through distressingly turbulent times. But they are hardly unprecedented. As I leave a long career in the museum field, primarily with institutions dedicated to documenting events of mass murder and commemorating the victims of those crimes, I feel compelled to share a few insights gleaned from seminal moments when I witnessed the potential of memorial museums to help us navigate through such times.
The first came at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like so many of the Holocaust survivors who were among the passionate founders of this great institution, Elie Wiesel fervently believed that merely telling
the story of what happened—facilitating a confrontation with atrocity—would ensure fulfillment of the pledge “Never again!”
Yet, on a dreary, wet April day in our nation’s capital, there he was, standing alongside President Bill Clinton and publicly pleading with him to do something about the atrocities taking place in Bosnia. Already, even on the cusp of the Holocaust Museum opening its doors, “never again” rang hollow.
A memorial museum in and of itself cannot prevent future genocides. But that didn’t mean the museum would be without impact. The moral authority the museum would attain by attesting to the history of the Holocaust would enable it to serve as a platform for heightened awareness and advocacy. As places of active witness, memorial museums can, at their best, serve as catalysts for personal, and perhaps collective, commitment to positive social change. They can affirm, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that hope is neither futile nor naive.
A second seminal moment helped shape my understanding of the potential of memorial museums to be places of healing. Shortly after the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened, Pope Francis asked to host what he called a “multireligious meeting for peace” in Foundation Hall, the central gathering space inside the museum, which is dominated by an exposed portion of the slurry wall—the retaining wall built to keep the Hudson River out of the original World Trade Center construction site.
On 9/11, the slurry wall was severely challenged as a result of the attacks, and within weeks, cracks were discovered. Recovery workers spent months reinforcing the wall with anchors, knowing that if it breached, subway tunnels would flood and lower Manhattan would be inundated, making the devastation of an already unthinkable disaster even more unimaginable. But, the slurry wall held, and it became a symbol of strength and endurance, an emblem of the city’s and our nation’s fortitude and resilience.
During his interfaith assembly, Pope Francis stood with clergy from multiple faiths directly in front of the slurry wall. Each spoke or sang prayers from their own liturgies. I found myself listening hard—not so much to the words, most of which were in languages I don’t know—but to a shared intention conveyed by the transcendent and universal language of music.
I had been trained by this project to listen hard. When planning our exhibitions, one of our advisers, a trauma psychologist, had cautioned us to be exceedingly careful about the use of audio recordings in the museum. He explained that nothing is more emotionally impactful than the sound of the human voice. Where film and photos might capture the action, it is in the timbre of the human voice that you feel what another person is feeling.
So, as I sat in Foundation Hall on September 25, 2015, listening to these religious leaders, I could hear in all of their voices what Pope Francis conveyed: “Here, amid pain and grief, we ... have a palpable sense of the heroic goodness which people are capable of, those hidden reserves of strength from which we can draw. ... This place of death became a place of life too.” In selecting the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to be the setting for his interfaith gathering, Pope Francis understood the palpable power of this place to galvanize, inspire, and advance a recognition of our shared humanity and our innate capacity to meet adversity with resolve, resilience, and renewal.
The third insight came in early March 2018, just a few weeks after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Approximately 60 students from the school’s Wind Symphony, their band conductor, and parent-chaperones visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Their decision to come to the museum was a deeply personal one. One of the 17 individuals killed in the Parkland massacre had been a member of the band; another was the niece of a 9/11 recovery worker now terminally ill from exposure to toxins at Ground Zero.
We invited a few members of our board to welcome the group. Among them was Howard Lutnick, a 9/11 family member who had lost his brother, his best friend, and more than 650 colleagues in the attack. He told the students that he knew how they felt ... and he wished he didn’t. He told them that well-meaning people would tell them that time heals all wounds, but it’s just not true. He told them that this tragedy, their profound sense of loss, would always be with them. But he also told them that while they would never be the same, they would now live their lives at a deeper level of understanding.
At that moment, I was witnessing the true potential of our institutional mission: an ability to connect with a generation reeling from far too many incidents of extreme violence and senseless loss of life happening in places that were once safe—our schools, our places of worship, our neighborhood grocery stores.
By telling our story, we could help them navigate a world filled with uncertainty and with change so rapid that it feels intensely threatening and destabilizing. We could offer that deeper level of understanding, not just about what happened here at this site, but about fundamental things human beings have been trying to make sense of for millennia: life’s unpredictability, the randomness of evil, our innate capacity for selflessness, the spiritual defiance of hope. We could help them reimagine the unimaginable.
Reasons to Hope
As all of us struggle to adapt to this rapidly changing world of seemingly insurmountable and unexpected challenges, as leaders try to lead during such complex times, and as parents strive to guide their children to productive and responsible adulthood in a century fraught with turmoil and tension, what I learned from memorial museums might well provide a useful road map, leading to fundamentals we should all take to heart.
Accentuate the authentic.
Talk straight and tell it like it is.
Present the evidence and be clear about the facts, no matter how difficult they are to confront.
Encourage empathy.
Listen hard to all sides of the argument—and don’t shut down because you disagree.
Explain your decisions with compassion.
Be honest; truth matters.
And, above all else, challenge the darkest of days with the brilliance of light: tell the stories that leave people with hope.
Greenwald, Alice M. "A Time of Transformation" Museum, May—June 2023, pp. 14+. aam.us.org