Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Los Angeles

You will find the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, or LAMOTH, in The Grove. It is the oldest museum of this kind in the United States. It is an eye-opening and heart-catching experience and isn’t recommended for children under the age of 12.

The idea for the museum began in 1961 at the Hollywood High School, where students who had survived the Holocaust got together and decided they needed a place to keep the various artefacts they had carried out of that hell. They also wanted to express the horror and inhumanity of the era so that future generations would never forget and never repeat the monstrosity.

In 2010 a new building was designed by Hagy Belzberg on Pan Pacific Park. It has one of the largest green roofs in California and nine exhibition rooms that use lighting in an innovative way: from room to room the lighting grows dimmer as you approach the darkest pages ever to be written in the History of mankind. The original artefacts, donated by survivors from all over the world, are arranged in such a way that they tell their own mute story. There are also interactive video and audio exhibitions and you will find printed guides that give details of the people whose histories you will find throughout the museum.

In The Memory Pool in the World That Was section you will learn about Jewish life in Europe before the Second World War. Wall displays give a picture history of the Rise of Nazism between 1933 and 1938. In the World Response/Resistance/Rescue section you will find stories and photos of the brave people who helped to hide and to save their Jewish friends and neighbours.

18 displays in the Deportation and Extermination and Labour/Concentration/Death Camps sections depict the horror and harshness of the Nazi-created “final solution”; the monitors showing footage taken from the era are particularly difficult to watch. You will also find exhibits from the persecution of Catholics, homosexuals and other unfortunates who didn’t fit in with Nazi Idealism.

There are also scale models, one of Hartheim Castle where the mentally ill and handicapped were imprisoned and used in horrendous medical experiences. The model of the Sobibor Death Camp is accompanied by a video where one of the survivors explains how the camp worked and how its inmates finally rebelled and were saved.