The Identity Card Project and the Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Abstract

Upon entrance to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the visitor is ‘invited to register’ for an identity card. The most troubling issues for Smith at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were precisely those that confuse the fine line between the nearimpossibility of confronting Holocaust memory and history as palimpsest, the responsibility of ‘telling the story’, and the difficult indispensability of employing documentary photographs. The employment of the face on the identity cards suggests a point of arrest bridging the utter horror depicted through the mass of Holocaust-related documentary photographs and the sheer refusal to depict the atrocities. The instantaneous and fantasmatic longing that enacts the mourning of incorporation takes us back to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Martin Smith’s desires for the identity card project: ‘to establish an immediate bonding with a person and a place’.