Holocaust Museum Barracks Coming Back to Europe

Katherine Boyle, 'Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks at Holocaust Museum to be returned to Poland', Washington Post September 25 2013.

 The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has closed a portion of its permanent exhibition to remove one of its most moving and powerful artifacts: wooden barracks that housed prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The barracks are being returned to Poland after the end of a long-term loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The Holocaust Museum has obtained similar barracks from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to replace the original ones, which have been a centerpiece of the exhibition since the museum’s opening in 1993.  The new barracks will belong to the museum in Southwest Washington.Holocaust Museum Barracks Going Back to Poland  [...] Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and project director for the museum during its construction, said that the museum was designed and built around the barracks. “If you look at the pillars of the building, it has slats in them which take those barracks. It’s a complex operation to remove them,” Berenbaum said. “The good news is that the museum will receive barracks in return and will own that barracks so we don’t have to face this problem again.

I think the encasing of the loaned object in the pillars of the building speaks volumes.