Steadfast witness to Holocaust dies, age 90

Museum director worries about loss of eyewitness survivors of hatred

Every Friday morning, Henry Greenbaum donned a suit and carefully coordinated tie, sometimes a pocket square. His father, decades earlier in Poland, had been a tailor. For more than 50 years, Greenbaum operated a dry cleaners in Washington. He had about him a gentlemanly elegance, people who knew him recalled — even a “gravitational pull,” said one.

He traveled those Fridays from his home in Maryland to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., where he would take a chair at a small desk near the information center and sit from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., offering a greeting to any visitor who wished to meet him and an answer to anyone, particularly the young, who had a question. “Sick or not sick,” he said, “I go in.”

Greenbaum, who died Oct. 24 at 90, was a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi killing center in German-occupied Poland where more than 1 million Jews, non-Jewish Poles and others were murdered during the Holocaust. At the Holocaust museum, he was one of the longest-serving members of the corps of survivor volunteers, a loyal cohort that translates documents, conducts research and gives tours, making real for visitors the history contained in the museum’s exhibits.

With the passage of time, “we are losing our best teachers about the dangers of unchecked hatred,” Diane Saltzman, the museum’s director of survivor affairs, said in an interview. “We’re seeing a rise in antiSemitism, and as it is rising, we’re losing our survivors. … It’s a very challenging moment, and it’s challenging us to think about what lies ahead when we don’t have the eyewitnesses here to tell us what happened.”