'Time Is Running Out': Museum Curator In Florida Races To Preserve Holocaust Items
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is in a race against time. It's been almost 75 years since the end of World War II. And the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling every year. Many of them live in South Florida, so the museum has hired a new curator there to help collect their stories. Reporter Caitie Switalski from member station WLRN paid a visit.
CAITIE SWITALSKI, BYLINE: Aimee Rubensteen didn't have the luxury to take her time and get acclimated to her new job.
AIMEE RUBENSTEEN: Time is running out. Truly, the clock is ticking. We need to meet eyewitnesses as soon as possible before they're no longer with us.
SWITALSKI: Immediately after starting as South Florida's acquisitions curator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she began meeting weekly with Holocaust survivors and family members. She's looking for people who want to donate any object that they've held onto from the pre-World War II era, during the Holocaust or just after.
RUBENSTEEN: Original family photographs, handwritten letters, documentation that might include immigration information or receipts that people kept when they crossed borders, passports, luggage tags.
SWITALSKI: To ask people to give up physical links to lost family members is not easy. But Rubensteen uses her own family's history to connect with the people she meets. Three of her grandparents survived the Holocaust. Rubensteen also has the history background to tackle object preservation. She spent years working in museum galleries and an auction house - Sotheby's, the Guggenheim. Most days, she's on the road. One of the first survivors she met with was Peter Tarjan at his house in South Miami.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
PETER TARJAN: Hello, Aimee. Come on in.
RUBENSTEEN: Hi, Peter. How are you doing?
TARJAN: Nice to see you.
RUBENSTEEN: Nice to see you, too.
SWITALSKI: Tarjan was about 8 years old when his parents were taken away from their home in Budapest. As an adult, he found out they died during death camp marches to Auschwitz. He's 82, and for a long time...
TARJAN: Three decades.
SWITALSKI: ...He'd been debating whether to give up a batch of 45 postcards and letters that his family sent to each other during the war.
TARJAN: Letters which my grandmother wrote to her daughters on stationery that she inherited from her uncle.
SWITALSKI: He pulls one out.
TARJAN: My dear Agatha, at last, finally, we got some news from you. I was very afraid that you had some trouble and that's why you didn't write. You are right, my dear Agi, it would be wonderful to see each other. But I don't have the energy to hope.
SWITALSKI: Tarjan's grandparents wrote that postcard in May 1944 from inside a ghetto in Hungary. They were later killed in Auschwitz. Tarjan was sent to an orphanage. And then his mother's best friend took him in. By the time the war ended, two surviving aunts were his only family.
TARJAN: Anti-Semitism doesn't disappear when the war ends. It continued in more subtle ways, but it never stopped.
SWITALSKI: That's one reason why he wanted the letters to have another life at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Giving the postcards up was emotional, but Tarjan wanted to make sure his family's last correspondences to each other weren't forgotten.
TARJAN: And the older I get, the more I feel that way. We are fragile. We are old. We are fading. If we stay here, we will continue to fade, deteriorate. And if I hand it over to a competent museum, then they will preserve it.
SWITALSKI: For Aimee Rubensteen, many survivors have kept these glimpses of daily life hidden. Pulling those stories out of people that have kept them closed off for so many years is a challenge.
RUBENSTEEN: Sometimes, I can tell that they are not ready to donate. And they're not ready to talk about whatever it is that they had scheduled to talk about that day. And I say I'm happy to come back.
SWITALSKI: Her strategy, when it comes to talking about historical family heirlooms, is to remind people about preservation.
RUBENSTEEN: I tell them that I'm here to advocate for the object. I'm here because if you think this object is important, we need to preserve it.
SWITALSKI: Histories that might otherwise have been lost. For NPR News, I'm Caitie Switalski in Miami.
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