Categories: just-life
Date: 19 July 2010 19:15:57
For the last few weeks I've been working in the Imperial War Museum in London and on the whole it's pretty cool. For those of you who have never been the IWM covers the conflicts that British and Commonwealth armies have been involved in since the First World War. This means that there are loads of tanks, guns, planes, memorabilia and most importantly stories.
There is also an exhibit on the Holocaust. Indeed the Holocaust exhibit is probably the largest single exhibit in the IWM taking up two floors. Now while I certainly do think that something on the scale of the Holocaust should be mentioned it was rather surprising to see just how much space was given over to this one event. And when I say surprising, that is because I'm then comparing it to the dinning room sized room that contains five touch-screen computers and a video documentary that then covers all other examples of genocide from the 20th Century. And that covers nearly 20 million people.
As a collegue said, you very much got the feeling that they had been told that they had to cover the Holocaust in a big enough manner that it was worth having the Queen open it.
And you consider that the museum is there to cover the wars that the British and Commonwealth armies have fought and when you take something like the Falklands War that gets a single display case that doesn't even contain a map of the islands to show what happened where. Indeed, the wikipedia page has more information about the war than the display!!