Turn a corner at the Florida Holocaust Museum and you come face to face with a railway car. The worn-out cattle car looks barely fit for animals. It's like one of the cars that rolled tens of thousands of innocent people to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
The wooden boxcar has no windows and the sliding door is closed, like those that sealed the fate of millions of people 80 years ago.
"It's a very powerful symbol of that era," said Ursula Szczepinska, who directs education and research at the St. Petersburg museum, which reopens Wednesday after a yearlong renovation.
"The door is closed because our survivors found it very disturbing to see it open, because obviously for us it's an artifact," she said. "For them, it was reality, so out of respect for them we keep the door closed."
The Holocaust was the systematic mass murder of 6 million European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.
Another artifact on display for the first time is equally hard to miss. Just inside the lobby sits a 10-ton Danish fishing boat called Thor. It was part of a flotilla that secretly evacuated almost all the Jews of Denmark to safety in neutral Sweden.
Szczepinska says it shows there were some righteous people who fought to stem the Nazi tide.
"It was actually still in Denmark as a regular boat. It still belonged to the same family as in 1943," she said, "and we were very fortunate to be able to locate it."
A melancholy song performed on one of the "Violins of Hope" sets the mood in one section of the museum. It was one of the instruments that were rescued at the end of the war in 1945.
Clayton Richards is the registrar of the exhibit. He's responsible for the music that accompanies the displays, setting the mood for that particular time.
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"At the beginning, we start with very ordinary cityscape sounds, and as we go through, the sounds are hyper specific to their own areas," Richards said.
"As you go through, there's a Hitler speech, a speech from (President Franklin D. Roosevelt) from the start of the war. This sound that you're hearing right now, the violin, was done on one of our Violins of Hope, so it's kind of evocative of the feeling of the area we're in, which is talking about ghettos, deportations, lost artifacts. So it's supposed to give that sort of melancholic feeling of this area."
The museum, at 55 Fifth St. S., has been completely renovated for the first time since it moved to a former downtown bank building in 1998. The third floor will soon display the personal items of Elie Wiesel, whose most famous books were based on his imprisonment at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Wiesel cut the ribbon when the museum opened in its current location.
At the time, there were enough local Holocaust survivors to meet personally with students who toured. But now, their numbers are dwindling. So family photographs, school records — even a blouse worn by one of the survivors — create a personal touch.
"Many of them are gone, but their legacy lives on through the story of the artifacts," Szczepinska said. "Every artifact has a biography of its own, and we can use it as an educational tool."
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There's an old saying: "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." So the museum puts an individual face on crimes of an unimaginable scale.
"We want to use this core exhibition to show people that these were individual human lives, right, one plus one plus one," Szczepinska said, "not the anonymous 6 million, but actually individual people who were impacted by this history. And it also helps people understand that this really happened."
One Holocaust survivor lives on in a new interactive video display. Before she died at age 93 in 2023, St. Petersburg resident Betty Grebenshikoff sat down for a series of interviews. You can ask her a question, and Betty — who found refuge during the war in Shanghai, China — comes to life.
"It was exceedingly crowded and it was always noisy, but we did the best we could over there, and we were lucky we didn't live in one of the settlement camps where a lot of people had to live," Grebenshikoff said in the video.
An unfortunate truth is that genocide and mass murder are not just history. Some say it's even happening today. So what do they hope people will walk away with here?
"We really want people to understand that this was a period in history that we do not want to see repeated, and unfortunately it is being repeated," said exhibits manager Caitlin Cranfill. "So what can we do to stop it?"
Marketing director Melissa Allen wants to keep history from being repeated.
"We like to lean on those lessons of the Holocaust to help try to learn from it and to inch even closer and closer to making 'never again' actual truth," Allen said.
Updated features of the museum include:
- A reimagined core exhibit: "History, Heritage and Hope." Occupying the museum's entire first floor, the exhibit traces the Holocaust from its origins to its aftermath through original artifacts, firsthand survivor testimony and deeply personal photographs.
- One of the museum's newest artifacts, Thor, is a 34-foot, 10-ton Danish fishing boat used in the 1943 rescue of more than 7,000 Jews from Denmark. In a powerful juxtaposition of tragedy and hope, Thor is exhibited alongside Boxcar No. 113 069-5, one of the few remaining railroad cars of the type used by the Nazis to transport Jews and other prisoners to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.
- Wiesel collection: A preview of select pieces entrusted to the museum by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 2024. It offers a glimpse into the life and legacy of Wiesel, a Nobel laureate, author, advocate and Holocaust survivor, and honors the extraordinary contributions of his wife, Marion.
- A new museum entrance will feature a special mezuzot (a small box containing a passage from the Torah that Jews traditionally affix to doorways), including one that guarded the door of Wiesel's personal office.
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