The railcar on display in the Museum's Permanent Exhibition. Courtesy of Polskie Koleje Panstwow S.A. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
These valises, which belonged to Jews who were deported to the death camps, are displayed at the base of the railcar in the Museum's Permanent Exhibition. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The railcar being installed at the Museum's construction site. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Dr. Oren Baruch Stier is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Florida International University in Miami. He was in residence at the Museum as a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellow in 2004.
For his Museum fellowship, Dr. Stier conducted research for his project “Holocaust Symbols: The Icons of Memory,” examining the historical and cultural contexts of symbols commonly associated with the Holocaust and exploring how a variety of iconic images, including personalities, artifacts, texts, and visual forms, convey awareness of and associations with the Holocaust.
With attention toward the basic symbolic building blocks of memorialization, his research focused on a range of images with which we are all familiar: railway cars, Anne Frank, yellow Stars of David, swastikas, and the Arbeit Macht Frei gates, among others.
“Symbols are things that all human beings need. We need them as a way to relate to the events of the past.”
—Dr. Oren Baruch Stier
Listen to interviews
- My research project as a whole deals with Holocaust symbols... [Play audio]
- The issue of symbolization I think is a complicated one... [Play audio]
- One of the ways I try to understand how the specific issue... [Play audio]
- Symbols are things that all human beings need... [Play audio]
- As I’ve been looking at the issue of Holocaust symbolization... [Play audio]
- What happens when one takes a symbol out of its original context... [Play audio]
- The railway car at the Museum has a very interesting history... [Play audio]
- I think my work reflects back on the significance of the Holocaust indirectly... [Play audio]
After completing his fellowship, Dr. Stier published an article on Holocaust symbolization and memorialization, investigating the relationship between religion and the Holocaust by analyzing the display of Holocaust-era railway cars in their institutional contexts. He argues that each railcar defines a distinct memorial ideology: initiatory, integrative, ambivalent, and monumental. By correlating these four ideologies with four classic theological responses to the Holocaust, he presents a typology for analyzing Holocaust memorialization.
The article, “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance,” appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2005.