Imperial War Museum London
Under glaring lights, the IWM’s new permanent exhibit lays bare an unspeakable atrocity through the small, human details
How many words, how many pictures, how many objects, does it take to tell the story of both the defining event of the 20th century and that bloody century’s greatest crime? How many square metres would all that fill up?
The answer is infinite, of course. And even though the new galleries dedicated to the second world war and the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum in London occupy more than 3,000 square metres, they somehow acknowledge the impossibility of their task. The exhibit reminds you at every turn that what you are seeing is the tiniest glimpse of an enormous whole, one that only seems to loom larger the further away we become.
