Cincinnati Holocaust museum opens in new home
Cincinnati’s Holocaust & Humanity Center moved into its new downtown home in late January on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The bigger, more high-profile space is nestled in the historic Union Terminal, the same train station where many Holocaust survivors and refugees who came to this Ohio city after World War II took their first steps in building new lives.
“We’re the only Holocaust museum in the U.S. with an authentic location to its site,” said Sarah Weiss, executive director of the Holocaust & Humanity Center.
“The location offers us an incredible opportunity to tell the history from the lens of those who arrived at this station,” Weiss added. “It’s a whole new narrative.”
The recently renovated Union Terminal, a working train station and art deco icon that’s also home to the Cincinnati Museum Center, marks the third location for the HHC, which started in 2000.
The 12,000-square-foot space showcases new artifacts, artfully detailed eyewitness accounts and interactive exhibits that address issues like genocide and hate crimes in the past and present.
“The museum, as you enter, starts with art,” Weiss said. “You see sculptures illustrating these arrival stories. A graphic mural depicts 25 eyewitness vignettes.”
The new Humanity Gallery includes a theater space, video projection mapping and interactive kiosks to shine a light on local and global injustices and to share the stories of people — “we refer to them as upstanders” — who’ve made a difference by having the courage to speak out. The idea, Weiss said, is to inspire visitors to push back against prejudice.
One of the new artifacts on display is a portion of a diary written by a young Holocaust survivor, the late Frank Homan, who eventually ended up in Cincinnati.
“It’s a diary he kept as a teenage boy as they were fleeing Germany,” Weiss said. “It’s a different perspective than Anne Frank. It’s his experiences as (he and his family) are going through different countries on their way here.”