The Race to Secure Truth
The Museum’s greatest responsibility is keeping Holocaust history relevant in a complex and changing world.
Building The Collection of Record — and ensuring its global accessibility — is the foundation for everything we do. Despite the millions of objects, documents, and other items we’ve collected, the majority of materials are still out there. That’s why the Museum is accelerating its race to collect the evidence while we still can, in an effort spanning 50 countries on six continents. This requires intensifying our investments in experts to preserve fragile, deteriorating objects, to catalog the collections so they are searchable, and to digitize them for preservation, research, and accessibility. We don’t secure truth by locking it in a vault; this enormous challenge requires many partners who share our vision to secure truth by sharing it with the world.
A New Way of Fundraising: Public Unites to Save Holocaust Diaries
After Germany invaded Belgium, teenager Joseph Stripounsky fled with his parents and younger brother, leaving almost everything they owned behind. He carried a textbook and two math notebooks, one of which became his diary. Over the grid-lined pages, Joseph kept a detailed record of his family’s harrowing escape to safety.
This diary, one of many first-person accounts that the Museum has collected since it opened almost 25 years ago, was central to an innovative online campaign launched this past summer on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site.
Save Their Stories: The Undiscovered Diaries of the Holocaust asked the public to pledge any amount they could to help the Museum raise $250,000 to catalog and publish online more than 200 diaries and translate three of them into English.
In the month-long campaign, over 5,600 donors gave more than $380,000, enabling the Museum to translate a dozen diaries.
“Especially now, as Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise, we must bring these stories to light,” said Kyra Schuster, the Museum curator who helped lead the project. “The diaries can help people understand the diversity of victims’ experiences, the complexity of this history, and its relevance to the world today.”
Reaching New Supporters
I’m so glad to see this project funded… . The preservation of these stories is so important, and I am glad that I could be a part of it.
— Kickstarter supporter Danielle M.
• More than 5,600 people from all 50 states and from 26 countries
on six continents came together to bring these stories to the public
• More than half had never before participated in a Kickstarter campaign
• 4,800 were new donors to the Museum
Learn more about the campaign at ushmm.org/kickstarter.
This article was first published in fall 2017.
