Illinois Holocaust Museum, Skokie, IL

 

Pinchas Gutter

The Illinois Holocaust Museum is in Skokie, Illinois. It was established after several marches were threatened in Skokie by neo-Nazis. The Chicagoland Holocaust Survivors created the museum. It moved to its present building in 2009. We have been to the Holocaust Museum in Israel, the Documentation Center in Nuremberg, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. So why go to another holocaust museum? We had seen on 60 Minutes showing how Holocaust stories were being preserved in a new way, week-long interviews that were captured by holograms. You can ask questions of a survivor and get their story. The Skokie museum is one of the places where you get to interact in this fascinating way. In our case, we heard from Pinchas Gutter, born in Poland in 1932, his family was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto and then sent to the Majdanek concentration camp. Here men and women were separated, and Pinchas saw his parents for the last time. He managed to survive three different camps and was liberated in April 1945. Even after liberation, he had to survive in a country devastated by war. He was eventually sent to a rehabilitation camp in Britain, and subsequently lived in France, Israel, South Africa, and now Canada. His story was fascinating, particularly how small kindnesses allowed him to survive the camps and their aftermath.

Another interesting special exhibit was “The Journey Back” where you accompany a survivor back to the camps he had been sent during the war. This is a virtual reality experience, my first ever, but was somewhat disappointing as they put black and white pictures of prisoners mixed in with the color picture of the prison camp today. Still, it was good.

Warsaw Ghetto - 20% of Warsaw's Population in 2% of land

The major exhibits go through the history of the rise of the Nazi Party, the targeting of Jews as the cause of Germany’s suffering after World War I, the elimination of Jewish businesses, the segregation of Jews, cripples, and other ‘undesirables’ into Ghettos and labor camps, and the “final solution” to exterminate the Jewish race. We were familiar with most of this material from other museums.

Jews Killed (red) vs. Pre-war Population

We finished off our trip by visiting our granddaughters in Minneapolis before heading home.