Everybody Had a Name, Melbourne Holocaust Museum

The Melbourne Holocaust Museum is Australia’s largest institution dedicated to Holocaust education, research and remembrance and the result of a 10-year project led by Kerstin Thompson Architects. Everybody Had a Name is the centrepiece and had to embody the museum’s mission to amplify the voices of Holocaust survivors. The museum was clear that this couldn’t be a conventional exhibition design – it needed a powerfully emotive approach to safely connect visitors with the survivors’ personal accounts as a catalyst to inspire greater understanding and hope for the future.

The exhibition combines the traditional design elements of space, light and colour with multimedia and sculptural features to craft an immersive and interactive journey through six ‘chapters’ of Holocaust history. Thylacine worked closely with the curatorial team to identify key storytelling moments and developed these into a timeline traversing life before the war, the rise of Nazism, the outbreak of WW2, liberation and its aftermath. A multimedia overlay ‘In the Footsteps’ provides a pathway to navigate the exhibition’s confronting stories, allowing visitors to follow the personal account of a single survivor.

This exhibition provides a sensitive but powerful exploration of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust by offering moments of connection to survivors’ own stories and creating evocative settings that put visitors in the centre of the narrative. For those of us fortunate to not live through these experiences, it can be challenging to comprehend: six million Jewish people murdered. The exhibition breaks down this enormous truth one story at a time to offer visitors familiar threads and experiences that they can relate to. The exhibition centres the voices of survivors, helping make sure that their stories are never forgotten.

A key aspect of the brief from the beginning was to maintain the personal connection between the visitor and the Holocaust Survivors whose stories are featured in the exhibition. “Everybody had a name – nobody has a grave” – this is what survivor Tuvia Lipson would tell visitors and school children when sharing his story of survival. The testimony of survivors and survivor families have always been a part of the visitor experience at Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Recognising the reality that we won’t have the privilege to hear this history from the survivors themselves for much longer, the exhibition needed to find a way for visitors to still ‘meet’ survivors and understand the Holocaust through their words. The multimedia storytelling overlay ‘In the Footsteps’ creates the space for this human connection and to preserve survivor stories in their own voices, long after they have left us.