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Research Notes
The Firebombing of the Terre Haute Holocaust Museum
A Hoosier Community Responds to an Assault on Collective Memory
William B. Pickett
| The events of a night in November 2003 in Terre Haute, Indiana, reminded local citizens that historical truth, though often unsettling, is also precious —and that its preservation keeps us in contact with essential principles of human dignity and morality. That night an arsonist destroyed a small museum dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. The identity and intent of the arsonist remains unknown, but it is doubtful that the response this violent act elicited was the one intended. In the days and weeks that followed, a sizeable group of citizens, including thousands of school children, came forward to offer support. Using newspaper articles, school fundraising activities, and electronic mail, they had within four months obtained donations sufficient to begin to rebuild the museum. By their spontaneous, positive response to an act of hate, these citizens created a new and considerably larger awareness in their community of the importance of the museum and its founder, a Holocaust survivor. They also revealed an awareness of the nature and causes of genocide—something they had gained from a variety of sources, including books and articles, Hollywood films, television programs, the Internet, curricular reform in the schools, visits to a newly created national Holocaust museum, and by 2003, perhaps most important, from continued violent assaults on civil societies by terrorist groups and brutal regimes. |
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The cities and small towns of Indiana and Illinois are filled with architecture and sculpture that commemorate politicians, authors, and wars. In Crawfordsville, seventy miles to the north of Terre Haute, for example, stands the birthplace (a white, two-story, neo-classical mansion) of Henry S. Lane, the United States senator who nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at the Republican convention of 1860. Crawfordsville also boasts the home and museum of Lew Wallace, Civil War Union general and author of Ben Hur. Greencastle, thirty miles to the northeast, houses DePauw University, formerly Indiana Asbury Institute, a nineteenth-century Methodist seminary. The institute's original building is still in use. On the nearby town square stands a monument to a different aspect of the city's history: the sacrifices of local soldiers in World War II. A German V-1 buzz bomb, one of the aerial weapons that Nazi Germany used to terrorize Great Britain in the 1940s, rests, now inert, on a concrete podium above U.S. Highway 231 as it loops around the Putnam County Courthouse. |
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Terre Haute boasts a similarly rich historical culture. The comfortable two-story, Victorian frame house that was the home of Eugene V. Debs, four-time Socialist candidate for president at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a living museum. Vigo County's memorial to its war veterans was, for many years, a Korean War-vintage F-84 fighter bomber (the first of its type capable of carrying an atomic bomb) parked on a corner of the courthouse lawn. This strangely-out-of-place aircraft reminded local residents of the sacrifices made by their young men over fifty years ago in Korea. Recently, a group of citizens working with veterans and Indiana State University designed and constructed a new veterans' memorial plaza at the courthouse, moving the F-84 to a less prominent location. |
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Such is the physical fabric of American communities, a nexus of objects from the past that provides clues to history and its lessons. The nation's founding fathers considered an educated citizenry essential to the survival of individual freedom. Hoosier children begin to learn the history of their state and country in the fourth grade. Illinois children also learn about the Holocaust, something the Illinois legislature mandated more than a decade ago. |
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