Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust

Book excerpt: Focusing on the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum; Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the book discusses how the representation of history by architecture creates a dialectic process in which architecture mediates the past to the present, while at the same time creating a present saturated with historical contexts. It shows how, together, they are incorporated into one another and create a new reality: past and present intertwined.