Jay M. Ipson

Executive director and founder of the Virginia Holocaust Museum

"I've talked to people that have come in here smiling and after a few minutes are in tears. People are good. You just in some cases have to bring it out, or bring it to the forefront."

We came over on June 12, 1947. I was 12 years old. We couldn't speak a word of English. Although my father was an attorney, his first job in the United States was cleaning bathrooms in an Esso Service Station at Second and Leigh streets. My mother worked as a seamstress for Thalheimers where they're now going to put the new center.

You couldn't come to the United States just because you wanted to come to the United States. You had to have a sponsor. And in 1910s, my mother's uncle through marriage came to Richmond and settled in Richmond and established the Pepsi Cola Company. We had no idea what a Pepsi Cola franchise was or what Pepsi Cola was. So when we asked for permission to come to United States, my mother's uncle became our sponsor. Consequently, they allowed us to come to Richmond.

We started the museum in May 1997 in five small rooms at the old school building that was Temple Beth-el. It was a religious school on Roseneath and Grove avenues. But with the number of students wanting to attend, we could not accommodate and do justice to education in that small space so we started looking for a new location that would be larger and would accommodate the number of students and teachers that wanted to come to the museum, not to mention the general public. So, during the process Congressman Eric Cantor, who was then in the state legislature and also from my district, found out that there was a warehouse at 2000 East Cary Street that was a surplus to the state. So through him we made an application to the state and the governor of the facility and the legislature was gracious enough to let us have it for the museum.

To be honest with you, I didn't. (laughs) I used to go around to schools every morning talking and trying to teach about the holocaust as a guest speaker. And I was also running a business at the time. I owned American Parts Company, which was an auto parts supply for trucks, cars and school buses. A couple of friends of mine came to me one morning and said, "You know, instead of you going around to talk to schools. Why don’t we make the schools come to you?" and save you some time.

Well, the idea was appealing, but I did not want to open up a facility in Richmond in competition with Washington and I told them the United States Holocaust Memorial in Washington is so close, what do we need one in Richmond for? They said the people that would come to Richmond would not take the additional time, or have the additional time, to go to Washington. So, I told them I'll go to Washington and have a discussion with them and get their opinion. So we drove to Washington and the people that we met in the Washington Museum, after they found out about having a picture in their archives of me in line waiting to be deported for execution with my family, they thought it was a great idea to build a museum in Richmond to accommodate people that would otherwise not get exposed to any Holocaust education at all.

So then I said OK. It'll save me time leaving home at 6 (a.m.) and driving somewhere in the state to give an 8 o'clock lecture for a class. Well, as it turned out to be, instead of a few hours, it is now a seven day a week job, 10 hours a day.

It is very gratifying when you see the effect that the museum has on people. There are hundreds of people that come in here and say, "I had no idea what it was all about. How can Holocaust deniers deny the Holocaust with all this evidence?"

I've talked to people that have come in here smiling and after a few minutes are in tears. People are good. You just in some cases have to bring it out, or bring it to the forefront. And when they leave here, many have told me -- and some have come back four or five times -- their whole life has been changed. They look at their neighbors as neighbors and friends and understand more about the difference between people.

We have a virtual museum. I have intentionally made it big where you feel you are there. You're not an observer. You're a participant. When you visit our museum, you're not looking at a lot of pictures, but we have them out there. But each exhibit puts you in the middle of the action. Nothing is behind glass, everything is open. It's alarmed, but it's open.

You can feel that you're a part of what happened in the section that you're at. When you go into a concentration camp, you are one of the inmates observing the scene around you. Other museums display it with pictures on the walls where you're an observer like you're in an art museum. This is not an art museum.

I try to talk with the outside of me. I try to keep an armor between me. Like a turtle -- the outside is hard and the inside... Every now and then, somebody will get to me. And when they do I have difficult time not getting teary eyed. There are certain questions that I have to not …because I lived it, I try to program how deep I'll let it come, but every now and then somebody will hack the program. And then it becomes very difficult. At night, many times I have nightmares and I can't turn it off. Many times in middle of the night, I'll wake up and say, "You know, this is something that I've left out." I've totally blocked it out, but it's an important part of the Holocaust and the museum.

After somebody spoke to me a couple of months ago, all of a sudden I realized. People said, "For six months you didn't have a bath. What was the first bath like?" And the first bath was a sauna. Well, not a sauna as we know it today, but a shack in the middle of a field not far away from a lake where there was a pile of rocks that you heated and poured lake water on it to get the steam to go over your body and with a branch from a tree is what you cleaned yourself with. So, I came in the next morning and built it (at the museum).

The same thing happened when somebody was talking to me about my father, who was a witness to the Nuremberg Trials, and all that just came pouring out in the middle of the night. The next morning I woke up and called a friend of mine and said, "Wouldn't it be something to build a Nuremberg Courtroom as part of the museum because that is history that no one else covered?" We now have a full size courtroom of Nuremberg. That's how things happen.

I was in the military. I volunteered for the Army when I was 18 years old. I wasn't drafted. I volunteered. I tried to lead a normal life. I never had any close friends. I have a few close friends now, but I've always been a loner and lonely and I always had to excel by being better than anybody else. I always had to prove that I was as good as anyone else, but I had to go one step further in order for me personally to feel that I'm as good as anybody else. That's part of the drive that drives me. I very seldom felt accepted.

I was 6 years old. When we moved into the ghetto, the house that we moved into was with my grandparents. So I did not feel the transition from outside to inside the ghetto. A lot of people had a transition. Of course, we lost all our furniture, all our belongings. I lost my favorite coat because it was taken away from me. I had a fur coat that was embroidered real fancy on the outside. The fur was on the inside. I had to give it up. The Germans took that away from me, but materials lost didn't mean anything to me be because the whole family was as a unit.

The first loss I felt was when my grandparents were deported. They were taken away right in front of us. Mother and I and her parents, two brothers and a sister were all being deported. A Jewish policeman that was a friend of my father's from law school recognized me and pulled me out of line and told me and mother to get out of line. Mother resisted. She wanted to go with her parents, and I started to cry. I told her I wanted to go to my father. I pulled out of the line. We were the only two that survived out of 5,000 that were deported that day. Our whole family was gone and that was the first time I started feeling a loss because I didn't know where they were, if we'd ever see them again.

At that point, we were confined in an underground hole where we lived for six months, never going to the top, but I did not feel any problems because we were together -- my mother, father and I were. At that time, if you had a piece of bread, water and some sauerkraut, that made a meal.

Six months later, we were liberated by the Russians. We went back to our home. The people that had moved into our home, which was still fully furnished, were German collaborates. They were Lithuanians, but they were still German collaborators so when the Russians came, they ran with the Germans. So my father was able to reclaim our home from the caretaker that was there and we moved back in.

We lived there from 1944 to mid-1945 and then we escaped from the Russians and made our way to the West German Zone, which was the American zone. We made our way to Munich where my father got a job, working for United Nations Relief and Restitution Organization. He was in charge of all the transportation in the American zone. Because he was multi-lingual, he got the job as supervisor.

Probably 150,000. About 70 percent are students. This is probably going to be our busiest year. Every year, we've had increases.

That means our message is getting out. I have seen children bring their parents after a school visit. That means we've had a positive impact on the child and I've seen students come back three and four times bringing their friends and bringing their family members that have come here to visit. So, we are having a positive impact on the community as well as other communities. People have traveled 200 to 300 miles to get here because now our presence has been penetrated into other states.

Our goals are limited by the amount of money we can get. We do not charge any admissions for anything. In order to keep expanding the museum in an educational mode, we need to raise funds in order to be able to build classrooms and modern equipment. One of the goals that I have is to build a distance learning center so that we can send lessons from here into classrooms as more and more classrooms now have video equipment so we can have a two-way conversation with students that are away from here that couldn't possibly get here or the budgets don’t allow bus transportation for a trip. So we could give them important information from here through video conferencing.

The quality of the museum itself and the inhumanity of man. Most people do not realize what had happened during Word War II, what the Nazis did to their neighbors and what my neighbors did to me. Ninety-two percent of the Jews that were killed in Lithuania were killed by our Lithuanian neighbors. Our neighbors did the killing. Out of 220,000 Jews, only 2,500 remained alive in Lithuania. And (of those) only 48 children survived. I'm one of those 48 children.

It's hard to understand. That's why I'm trying to teach our neighbors here to be good neighbors to everybody.

What did it feel like to be a survivor?

His response: It's very difficult. Many of us deal with it in different ways. Some just have totally closed off that section of their life and don't think about, don't talk about it. Certainly, they think about it, but they try not to bring it to the forefront. Others felt that through talking they can educate people and try to hopefully, affect other people to be just, to show the justice of what had happened.

To be a survivor is a very lonely life. You feel guilty. Why did you survive what others members of your family did not? You almost picture yourself as a branch that has been cut off a tree and laying desolate on the ground. You have no grandparents, in some cases you have no parents. You don't have any sisters. You don't have any cousins. You don't have a point of reference in a celebration with the family get-togethers. Most of them have one or two or no members of their family and they built new families but by building new families you really haven't gotten a root. It's like a tumbleweed. You're starting all over again, but you have no base. So it's a lonely life.

In my particular case, I grew up without any uncles, aunts, without any grandparents. I didn't have the luxury of a Thanksgiving dinner to give thanks for the huge family.

When Rosh Hashanah is celebrated, we celebrate it with apples and honey for a sweet year. We got to the synagogue. We give to charity. We feel that we need to help those that are less fortunate and even those that are less fortunate realize that there are people less fortunate than them and they also give to charity.

Different people deal with it in different ways, especially Holocaust survivors. There are Holocaust survivors that have become more devout. There are Holocaust survivors that have totally given up their faith and to them it's just another day. They felt how could God let this happen? But then there are those that survived that now feel an obligation not to let it happen. And they go to the synagogue and they pray and prayers are said for those that are departed that don't have anybody to pray for them.

And it's a time for whatever family you have to get together, just like at a Thanksgiving dinner, everybody gets together for Rosh Hashanah. You wish each other a sweet and healthy and prosperous New Year so that you can continue to be generous to those that need help and that you should be healthy and be there for the next New Year.

Every holiday that you can have your family around you is an important holiday. The time of year doesn’t matter. The holiday doesn't matter. You need to be glad that you're alive and you've got someone to hug. You've got your children around you, your grandchildren around you. That has made life worth living.

I normally get home around 7 o'clock. I have something to eat and either I have pre-recorded something related to World War II and the Holocaust that I've copied down on the DVD for our archives here. I record a lot. Or I'll watch a light show on television. At 9 o'clock, I turn into a pumpkin and at 5 o'clock, I get up.

I watch the news every day. I get up watching the news and I go to sleep watching the news because the world situation is really important. Mostly right now, I read and study the research to make our museum as authentic of the period as possible. Our museum library does not have any novels. It has close to 5,000 books, all of them documentary. We have a video library with interviews of Holocaust survivors, liberators and witnesses, first hand accounts of the Holocaust. That's where my leisure time goes.

In a way, Richmond is the birth of history. If you go back to the founding of Richmond, you can almost replicate what happened in other parts of the world. The spot where this museum is, is where the Jewish community originally was settled. They participated in the building of Richmond. You've got Patrick Henry's famous remarks of "Give me liberty or give me death." I'd say probably every resident of Richmond feels the same way about it. We have historic buildings. If you take a tour through our cemeteries, you can learn the fiber of the city, which now has become more all inclusive than at one time was exclusive. There were times in Richmond where Jews could not live in certain areas. Neither could blacks. Thank goodness those times are gone. So we have become an inclusive community.