My Day at the Museum

The museum provides a moving, solemn experience.

A lot of you have been asking me how everything went during my Tuesday visit to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie. The Visitor Experience Coordinator there (along with a museum consultant) invited me to come Tuesday to take a tour and do an accessibility review and walk-through of the museum on behalf of people who are blind–all part of a much-appreciated effort to make the museum more accessible to people with disabilities.

In a word, the whole experience was … overwhelming. Knowing this would be the case, they included this reassuring paragraph in the initial invitation:

We realize this is a long day and difficult subject matter. We’ll take breaks as needed that may include coffee breaks, fresh air outside, or anything else you may need.

Disclosure: I asked to be helped outside once, during the live presentation by a holocaust survivor. Thinking about that now, I’m kind of ashamed. Here I could just leave and get away from it for a bit. People in concentration camps didn’t have that option.

But let’s start at the beginning. Before our tour began I was introduced to Maureen, a lively and engaging woman who is deaf and has a cochlear implant. She had been invited to assess the museum from her point of view.

We were told right from the start that the entire museum is built of rough concrete to give visitors a sense of how harsh the holocaust experience was. “Could you lead me to one of the walls so I could feel it?” I asked, giving Seeing Eye dog Luna the “follow” command so I could get a sense of just how big and rough each square of concrete is.

Every room at the Museum felt cold and stark, which I learned later was the late architect Stanley Tigerman’s point: he wants visitors to feel a sense of foreboding while walking through the exhibits. A cool idea, except for this: most of the rooms are so large that they echo like crazy. Many have multiple video screens hanging on the walls that I assume featured holocaust survivors telling their stories, but with so many playing — and echoing — at once I couldn’t hear the narrators.

Neither could Maureen, who said that one of the worst situations for her to be in is one where two different voices are talking at once. The videos do have captions, though, so she was able to read them to keep up.

The Visitor Experience Coordinator and the Museum Consultant were with us the entire time, welcoming our comments, asking questions and taking notes. “Would it help if we had a sign that said that in Braille?” “Can you tell the floor is slanted downward when you’re walking here?”

They gave helpful explanations of the photos, artwork and artifacts hung on the walls, but any time I reached out instinctively to touch one, I’d get the same three-word response: “It’s under plexiglass.” Made perfect sense. The items were all precious, important parts of history. Knowing me, I would have dropped one of them!

Seeing Eye dog Luna led me through some of the exhibits, and the Visitor Experience Coordinator led me sighted-guide through others. The one thing that was easiest for me to take in was the hologram – only one screen in that room and no problem hearing the monologue.

We all sat down after the tour to throw out some suggestions of ways to make the exhibits more accessible, places where audio description could work, exhibits that could use more captioning, and how and where tactile maps might be helpful. The Visitor Experience Coordinator and the Museum Consultant thought it might be a good idea to form a Disability Advisory Committee of people with disabilities to meet quarterly. “You know, they might have other advice and ideas to share about accessibility.”

I am  ever so appreciative of the efforts the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is going through to make their space accessible to all. And bonus points to them for getting answers to their questions right from the experts: people who have disabilities!