Virtual Memories: Mediating the Holocaust at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah-Museum of Tolerance

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY IN THE COURSE of a visit to the permanent exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum one comes upon the room-sized Hollerith machine, an early card-punch device, ancestor of the contemporary computer and an early example of IBM technology. The Hollerith machine was used by the Nazis to organize and process census data and information on conscript labor, and it may have been used as well to compile deportation rolls, the infamous lists that located and identified Jews and were instrumental in their murder.' Though the machine itself is not intrinsically sinister, its inclusion at that point in the narrative of the exhibit reminds us of the gravity of the relationship between modern technology and the Holocaust-a force that bears down upon the museum visitor and contributes to her awareness that the Holocaust was a quintessentially technological