Queensland Holocaust Museum
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Australia’s newest Holocaust museum, opened in 2023 and located in Brisbane, the capital of the state of Queensland, and with a focus on Holocaust survivors who settled in this state during or after WWII.
>Combinations with other dark destinations
More background info: For historical background see under the Holocaust as well as associated memorial sites such as Auschwitz or the various other concentration camps and death camps; cf. also other Holocaust Museums such as the USHMM or Yad Vashem as well the equivalent Australian institutions in Melbourne and Sydney.
Like those older institutions in Victoria and New South Wales, this Queensland counterpart goes back to initiatives on the part of the local Jewish community and especially certain Holocaust survivors.
There was a predecessor temporary exhibition in Brisbane’s City Hall (opened in 1982), but this current permanent museum opened only as recently as July 2023. Amongst its board members is the grandson of Holocaust survivors Bert and Eva Klug, who also feature in the exhibition.
What there is to see: Once you’ve gained entry and passed through security you walk down a long corridor, which on one side features a wall of names of Holocaust survivors who settled in Queensland, before reaching the permanent exhibition proper.
The exhibition doesn’t have all that many authentic artefacts on display, but amongst them are a striped concentration-camp inmate jacket worn by one Holocaust survivor, a couple of yellow “Jewish” stars, a Torah saved from the Nazis as well as all manner of personal items. Most have been donated by Queensland-resident Holocaust survivors (some items are on loan).
The story of the Holocaust and its context is told manly through text-and-photo panels and covers the history of anti-Semitism, the rise to power of the Nazis, a timeline of the increasing repression of Jews in Germany, Nazi propaganda, the pogrom night (“Kristallnacht”) of November 1938, the Anschluss of Austria, and of course WWII and then the “Final Solution”. Other victims of persecution by the Nazis also get a mention, e.g. people with mental disabilities who were murdered under the T4 “euthanasia” programme. Four separate “discovery pods” delve deeper into certain thematic aspects. There are also video screens for moving images and survivor testimonies.
A particular emphasis is also given to the “Righteous Among the Nations” (cf. Yad Vashem) such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. One Queensland Holocaust survivor made it thanks to the help of Japanese Vice-Consul Chiune Sugihara who in Kaunas, Luthuania, issued transit visas to Jews so that they could escape the Nazis. One panel also covers the acts of solidarity on the part of Aboriginal Elder William Cooper from Victoria who led a protest march to the German consulate in Melbourne shortly after “Kristallnacht” (see also Sydney Jewish Museum).
Another section is about the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide that were developed towards the end and after WWII and first implemented at the Nuremberg Trials.
A strong emphasis is placed on Queensland’s Holocaust survivors’ personal stories. In one room that is designed to resemble the inside of a typical deportation train carriage, six Holocaust survivors, who were interviewed in 2010, relay their memories of the Shoah on a video projection wall, except you don’t hear them speak and their testimonies only appear in writing. One of them was initially at the concentration camp of Sered, a place I had only recently discovered myself and visited less than a year earlier, in October 2023.
Outside this room a scale model of a Treblinka deportation train is on display that is incredibly detailed (and took the modeller years to assemble). Its engine is of the same type as the one you can see for real at Radegast Station in Łódż. The model train has only two carriages, but one has no roof, thus opening up a view inside the carriage … crammed full with deportees en route to the death camp’s gas chambers.
Also in this part there is a heap of replica suitcases with names on them of actual people who were killed at Treblinka, including Janusz Korczak.
There are volunteers on hand to provide additional information, and one tried to get my wife to experience an ‘augmented reality’ (AR) feature with one of those 3D VR headsets, but it didn’t really work.
Finally there’s a room that serves as a memorial to the ca. 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust. In one corner I spotted a box of tissues at the ready for those visitors who cannot hold back their tears. It’s only the second place where I’ve encountered this; the first was at the 9/11 exhibition inside St Paul’s Chapel in New York.
An additional panel, as a sort of afterthought, briefly references genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia (Srebrenica), Iraq, Myanmar and China.
Another add-on is a separate AR offer you can engage with by means of a smartphone, after scanning a QR code, to explore virtual 3D spaces and discover various aspects of Europe before the Holocaust and then the Holocaust itself.
All in all, I found the museum a worthwhile addition to the things to do and see when in Brisbane, even though size-wise and in terms of breadth of coverage this comparatively small museum can’t quite compete with its much larger counterparts in Sydney and Melbourne. It is more modern perhaps, but I thought it was trying just a little too hard to be modern.
Google Maps locator: [-27.4693, 153.0287]
Access and costs: fairly easy to get to; not too expensive.
Details: to get to the museum is easy on foot from within central Brisbane. The entrance is however not directly at the address given above but at the rear of the building, reached by an alleyway (or “laneway” as the Australians say), just behind (ironically) St Stephen’s Catholic Cathedral. To enter you have to ring a doorbell/intercom and pass through security first (as is usually the case at most Jewish institutions of this sort).
Opening times: only Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (last entry at 3:15 p.m.)
Admission: 10 AUD (concession 8 AUD, children 5 AUD).
The museum is also an Education Centre and offers special programmes and tours for school groups. Furthermore there is also an interactive/immersive “online museum” built on gaming technology (at holocaustmuseum.online) to be explored at a computer.
Time required: I spent ca. 45 minutes in this museum, but visitors who want to make use of all the interactive elements and AR offers may need longer than that.
Combinations with other dark destinations: see under Brisbane.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: see under Brisbane.
