Cardinal Cupich toured the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s satellite museum, Experience360, April 13, taking part in a dialogue with a hologram of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and in a virtual reality experience.
After donning a headset to hear and see the story of Holocaust survivor Marion Deichmann, the cardinal said the museum’s emphasis on the stories of individuals is necessary to help people understand what happened in the Holocaust and in other genocides, as well as conflicts that are happening now.
“It’s in this storytelling that we begin to make these events that are so tragic real for us,” Cardinal Cupich said. “They’re real people involved. That’s one of the things that I’ve been talking about in terms of what we’ve experienced now in this gamification of war, where in fact we have turned war into entertainment.”
The pop-up museum, at 360 N. State St., was opened when the main museum in Skokie closed for renovation earlier this year. The Skokie museum is expected to reopen this fall, but the State Street pop-up will remain open through at least the end of the year.
“People sometimes understand the Holocaust as a story of murder and victimhood, and I’m hoping that when they come to Illinois Holocaust Museum and our Chicago satellite, Experience360, they will also understand the full complexity of the history, that it is also the history of resilience, of resistance, of survival, of strength, of hope, of our shared humanity,” said Bernard Cherkasov, the museum’s CEO.
The State Street museum includes information about a proposed neo-Nazi march in the late 1970s in Skokie, which was then home to the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the United States. The proposal drew wide protests and a court case; eventually, state and federal courts ruled that the National Socialist Party of America had a First Amendment right to march in Skokie, but instead it held marches in Chicago.
The threat of the march in Skokie, however, galvanized many Holocaust survivors, who banded together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. Thirty years later, in 2009, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center opened; it is the second-largest Holocaust museum in the United States.
Visitors to Experience360 are introduced to that history as they enter the galleries.
The exhibit reminds people that everyone must raise their voices to oppose violence and injustice, Cherkasov said.
“That’s what it takes, getting everybody involved, doesn’t it?” Cardinal Cupich agreed. “Nobody can sit on the sidelines.”
The exhibits include information about the World War II Holocaust, especially connections to Illinois and the Chicago area, and exhibits with artifacts saved by children who survived genocide, mostly but not all in World War II.
In that exhibit, Cardinal Cupich met Olga Weiss, who was 6 years old in 1942, when her parents went into hiding in a small village in the Netherlands. Because it would have looked suspicious for a school-age child to be at home, her parents sent her to the village Catholic school.
The pastor knew the family was Jewish, she said, but she never knew whether anyone else did.
“He was very brave,” Weiss said. “He could have been arrested and, yes, killed. I am forever grateful to that priest.”
That Dec. 6, her parents gave her a set of dominoes for St. Nicholas Day, so that she could take them to school and show off her gift like the other children. Those dominoes, with St. Nicholas written on the top of the box, are now part of the exhibit.
The museum has been recording survivors and creating holograms and virtual reality experiences for several years, as fewer and fewer remain. Survivors record a presentation, then, over the course of several days, answer about 2,000 questions, so those who view the presentations can ask what they want to know and hear a response.
The museum includes the voices and memories of survivors of other genocides, such as that of Kizito D. Kalima, a Tutsi survivor who was a teenager when the genocide happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Among the Jewish Holocaust survivors whom visitors can learn about and hear from is Fritzie Fritzshall, a former president of the museum, who became friends with Cardinal Cupich and traveled to the Auschwitz camp with him in 2019 as she recorded her virtual reality program, “A Promise Kept.”
Fritzshall died in 2021 at 91 years old.
It’s important, Cardinal Cupich said, for young people to learn about the Holocaust, and he applauded the museum’s efforts to make the stories of survivors accessible to students through the technology, both at the museum and through programs that travel to schools.
“We don’t want to shelter our kids,” the cardinal said. “I think we have to give them a dose of reality, of what the world is like so that this kind of thing is never repeated again.”
Museum staff said Experience360 is fully booked for field trips through the end of the school year, although it can accommodate only a fraction of the number of school groups that the main museum can host.
The exhibits, staff members said, tell the story of the Holocaust, but focus on what people can do now to help stop further genocides from happening.
“One of the hopes that I have for people visiting our museum is that they’ll walk away with a better understanding of our shared humanity,” Cherkasov said.