Audio above, Video (plus links to learn more) and Transcript below
Note from Annette
Pick your favorite format to read, view, or hear my chat with Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice, Senior Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC for the past three decades. We chat about Dr. Heberer Rice’s own research on the Nazi eugenics/euthanasia program, which killed hundreds of thousands of children and adults in Germany, the roles of the US Holocaust Museum, and why and how its permanent exhibition will soon be changing. We also discover what a Senior Historian is, the roles Dr. Heberer Rice plays at the Museum, and how she deals with being so immersed in the Holocaust, the most traumatic of subjects.
Thank you to Nonnies, paying annual and monthly subscribers, for making possible this and every post at Non-Boring History.
Annette
Dr. Annette Laing, renegade academic historian, Brit in America, and Historian in Residence at Non-Boring House, in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Transcript (lightly edited for clarity):
Annette Laing: This is Annette Laing at Non-Boring History! I’m delighted to welcome today Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice.
Patricia Heberer Rice is the Senior Historian and director of the Office of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. An historian with the Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies since 1994, she’s the Museum specialist on eugenic policies in the Nazi era and the persecution of people with disabilities during the Holocaust.
Dr. Heberer Rice holds a BA in history and German literature and a masters degree in history, both from Southern Illinois University; she studied for her doctorate in European history at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Maryland, which granted her the Ph.D. Among her many publications are the books Children during the Holocaust, and Documenting Life and Destruction. She is also co-editor of several books. Among these are Atrocities on Trial:The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective, as well as Nazi Sites for Racial Persecution,Detention, Murder, and Resettlement of Non-Jews. She is also co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Vol. V, which will appear online this coming spring.
Welcome, Patricia. It’s great to see you.
Patricia Heberer Rice: Good to see you too.
Annette: You obviously have an incredibly interesting field of study, a very traumatic field of study, and I want to get you talking about that. But I think what I want to start with is your, kind of, creation story. How you get into history?
Patricia: So originally, I wanted to be a journalist. I didn’t really know what I would be majoring in, and I just kept taking more and more history classes, as I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. And finally, my advisor just said, you almost have a history major, why don’t you declare a history major?
The other thing is that, I’m a German-American Lutheran girl. I was very interested in my grandfather’s family story. He came [to the US] in 1923 at the height of hyperinflation in Germany. So I became very interested in Germany and my family history, and that’s what made me want to become a German historian. My grandfather was an American citizen by 1933, but he had left most of his siblings behind in Germany. And many of them became Nazis. Very small fry, just local officials and Nazi Party members. But I remember saying to him, one day when I was a teen, I said, Grandpa, you wouldn’t have been a Nazi because you’re such a great guy. And he said to me, oh yes, yes, I would have, you know, my older brothers were Nazis. They would have convinced me to join the party.
I think maybe I was 18, 19 years old, just starting to study history. This made me think about about how history works, the individual stories behind history, and how people can be many characters and many things at once, and how complex the world is. I think that’s probably why I studied German history, and why I became a historian at the Holocaust Museum.
Annette: Which was going to be my next question is how you got interested in the Holocaust.
Patricia: I wanted to do German history, but I wanted to do 18th century history. So I’m a little closer to your field than to where I ended up. I went to my M.A. adviser and I said, I want to study about Johann Gottfried von Herder, the great German 18th century philosopher. And he said, do you want to do that, or do you want to graduate?
He pulled out a shoebox that he had evidently stolen from his wife, and it was full of microfilm, tapes, of post-World War Two Nazi war crimes trials in the American zone of occupation, because he was interested in that. And he said, which one do you want? You’re going to write your Master’s thesis about this. I said, Hadamar, because I had heard of him. I was bluffing, of course, because Hadamar is a place, not a person. So I was totally bluffing, and yet I started to be interested in this.
Hadamar was a facility of the euthanasia program in Nazi Germany. In the 80s historians were just starting to really work on this, even in the German language, the euthanasia program. It isn’t as well known a facet of the Holocaust as the genocide of European Jewry. I began to work with those materials. I can’t say I fell in love, but I became so interested that I’ve never lost interest. So that’s sort of the scholarly path I took toward being a Holocaust historian and getting a job at the Museum.
Annette: The range of ways in which the Nazis were able to inflict suffering never ceases to amaze me. I want to get back to talking about the so-called euthanasia that the Nazis practiced. But I also wonder, did you find yourself wondering, given what you had learned from your family, what on Earth would make anyone into a Nazi? I know there’s a lot of the [scholarly] work on that has only been done recently. Am I right?
Patricia: Yeah, I do a lot of what’s called in our field perpetrator history, as well as victim history. If you’re looking at perpetrators, there are as many motives for committing crimes under the aegis of the Nazis, or joining the Nazi party, as there were people, as there were individuals.
Lots of people joined the Nazi party because it was the thing to do. You could get a promotion in your job. As lots of people know from authoritarian states, even Communist states, joining the party usually advances your career. Many people joined because it furthered economic prospects, you know, as Jews began to be deported from Nazi Germany, people could steal Jewish goods, or they could take them at auction very cheaply. Some people [who became Nazis] were true believers.
The Museum looks at this, and they say the circle of really true believers in Nazism is small, smaller than you would think. There were a variety of other reasons that compelled people to join the Nazi Party. In the case of my relatives, my great-uncle, my grandfather’s older brother, joined the Nazi party in 1931. That’s two years before Hitler came to power. It was because of the lost [First World] war, [Germany’s losses of] territory, and limitations placed on the German Army, in which he had served, and just the terrible political and economic instability [following WWI].
My grandfather left in 1923 at the height of German hyperinflation. Hyperinflation wiped out the savings of the middle class. And they were middle class farmers. That’s when my grandfather went to the United States, to try to get a job in the States. I have letters from my relatives in Nazi Germany to my grandfather: This was before the Nazis actually come to power, the Weimar Republic [weak democratic German government set up after WWI] was very fragile and kind of floundering along. One of my great-uncles wrote to my grandfather, “I’m sorry, I haven’t written to you, but we’re voting every day.”
In other words, the governments were rising and falling, and I’m not sure that these were virulent anti-Semites, I don’t know for sure, but I’m sure I know that that instability in government , that very frail Weimar democracy, inspired a lot of my family members to seek a simpler solution, to get a strong leader. And of course, there are conspiracy theories, like anti-Semitism, connected with the Nazis that makes complex situations look simple. I think that’s that’s certainly a reason that a lot of Germans joined the Nazi party, normal ordinary Germans.
Annette: I’m sorry, I’ve distracted you with this subject. That’s a reflection of what I’m reading at the moment, which has been a mixture of Dr. Richard Evans’s work on Nazism-- his book about individual people, why they become Nazis, starting with Hitler- - and I’m also reading about the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. As you know, everything in history is particular, but we see the resonances. I think most Americans are unaware that the Klan in the 20s was not at all limited to the South. It was national, it was huge. That was a march in Washington DC, with 50,000 Klansmen in robes, 200,000 people watching. All this stuff is just of incredible interest to me. But I want to get back to your particular work as a scholar and then talk about your work within the museum, if that’s okay.
So your special interest is Nazis and eugenics, and I wonder, for our audience, if you could talk about what what eugenics means, where it comes from, and how the Nazis turned it into policy and practice.
Patricia: So eugenics is an international movement, a scientific movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics is a word coined by Sir Francis Galton. He was an English mathematician and naturalist, and a cousin of Charles Darwin.
Eugenics gained traction with the adoption of Darwinist theories like natural selection and survival of the fittest, and also with the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendelian genetics, so genetics as we know it. And basically, in a nutshell, it’s the idea of selective breeding: if you can breed a better dog, or better horse, as human beings have done for centuries, millennia in fact, you can breed a better person, and a better national body. Everywhere that eugenics was, eugenicists in that country had different ideas about how to use it. Here in the United States, eugenics tended to center on immigration policy. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was influenced by eugenicists, and for the first time, they gave quotas for each country, how many immigrants could come from that country, with huge quotas from places like Germany and Northern Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland . . .
Annette: Yeah, my grandfather’s cousin, my great-aunts, moved in the 1920s from Scotland. So we were believed to be eugenically superior despite being so in-bred, and while Japanese and Chinese were banned altogether.
Patricia: And then very small quotas for Southern and Eastern Europe. What they really are trying to do was keep a white Anglo-Saxon America. Eugenics is a utopian movement, but it tends toward the more prejudicial side of human endeavors, right? And the other [eugenics-related policy] in the United States was to control the intermarriage of the races. That’s something you see duplicated in Nazi Germany with the Nuremberg Laws ,when they forbid Germans and Jews from marrying. It’s a very similar policy.
Annette: So the Nazis’ policies on this came after the United States policies on this, and there’s a connection?
Patricia: Yes, there is a connection. And I want to interject, before I say anything more, that we think of eugenics today as pseudoscience, but we have to remember that in its heyday, right before World War One, in 1911, 1912, those saw the big international conferences on eugenics. It was cutting-edge science. We have to remember that. We have to remember that the United States, Great Britain, and Germany with a big leaders in this international movement .
Annette: So essentially eugenics was normal, part of science, as legitimate in its time, in the eyes of people of this time, as was any field of science that wasn’t actually driven largely by bigotry.
Patricia: Yeah, and in its heyday, which would have been before Hitler, this would have been the Kaiser’s Germany. So Hitler didn’t invent eugenics. But what happened is that the Nazis really latch onto this idea of eugenics, and when they come to power in 1933, they have embraced eugenics, including Hitler-- we know he read the seminal works of eugenics while he was in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch [an attempted Nazi coup in 1923] and embraced these eugenic ideas. So he’s coming into power with embracing these eugenic ideas and also bringing with him this virulent racial anti-Semitism that the Nazis deployed. It is in part propaganda and in part the true belief system and ideology of the Nazi Party, and they have the volition and the will to put those ideas into really concrete and radical ways.
And one of the first things they do is compulsory sterilization. There’s a July 1933 compulsory sterilization law, which allows for the compulsory or forcible sterilization of thousands and thousands of Germans who have some kind of physical or mental or social disability.
This was something that the Nazis were kind of following the American lead in, because the Americans had a sterilization system, we’re a federal system, so they go state by state, and the first state that had a sterilization policy was Indiana in 1907. That’s the earliest [US state] I could find where there’s a sterilization policy. And, by the time the Nazis have a sterilization policy, almost half of American states had some kind of law as well. So that’s something that the Nazis really followed the American lead on. A template bill for sterilization, written by American eugenicists, was something that the Nazis actually adopted for their centralized sterilization law. They sterilized about 400,000 individuals, both persons with disabilities, and those who are outside the social mores as they were constructed at the time in Nazi Germany.
Annette: It seems very clear that anti-Semitism ends up at the heart of Nazi thinking. But they did not start with sterilizing Jewish people specifically?
Patricia: In fact, it’s rarer that Jews were sterilized because eugenics is really this utopian idea, it’s cleansing the race, and the Nazis are less concerned about, you know, sterilizing Jews. Or let’s say Poles when they go to Poland. They want to cleanse their own race with this sterilization policy. That’s very important to think about.
Annette: And so how does this actually look? What do they do? How do they implement this?
Patricia: So they use a legal means of doing this. It was a public measure, it was a legal measure, and they invent this special tribunal called an hereditary health court. This is a Nazi legal invention. It’s sort of superimposed on the Nazi legal system and there were about 250 of these tribunals by, say, 1936. So the law officially goes into power in January 1934, and by 1936, you have about 250 of these hereditary health courts.
I should just say that Germany has never, or at least up until 1945, had a jury system. We have a jury system [in the US] because we are an old colony of the British and the British had a jury system. The Germans have characteristically followed Continental law, which is a little bit different than our law, our way of jurisprudence, and even today, most trials in Germany are conducted before a jurist or tribunal, rather than a jury system. That’s actually pretty rare in criminal cases today, even.
But what makes these hereditary health courts really interesting is that they are usually three people, usually three men, and one of them is a jurist, so a trained judge. The other two are physicians, and they are the sort of decision makers within each of these tribunals who adjudicate a denunciation to public health officials that someone has one of the conditions that allows for sterilization in Nazi Germany.
Annette: How does somebody come to the attention of this court, as a candidate for compulsory sterilization? Who’s turning them in?
Patricia: Doctors, many of them, because doctors are noted in the law, they must, or be fined or imprisoned if they do not. They have to denounce patients they see in their practice who have one of these nine conditions outlined in the law. But also social workers. That’s especially true with so-called gypsies, we would call them Roma and Sinti, and teachers in many cases, because they’re seeing students with disabilities, or people who they think are outside of the mores of German society.
Annette: I can see people like doctors, social workers, teachers, convincing themselves that it’s for the greater good, that children who today we might call intellectual disabilities, and saying, you know, probably best that they not have children. I could see them persuading themselves of that. Where it starts to get really, really even more scary, of course, is when they start killing people. How does that come along?
Patricia: Most historians think that the sterilization policy, which lasts until the end of the Third Reich, but really ramps up between 1934 and 1939, we think of that as the bridge toward the euthanasia program. And the “euthanasia program”, you want to see that in scare quotes, of course, because it’s really a cynical, clandestine, a secret program of mass murder carried out on German soil, targeting, these individuals, children and then adults, very shortly thereafter, beginning 1939 for children, and in January, 1944, for adults, targeting people in institutions with disabilities for mass murder. It’s one of the first programs of mass murder carried out by the Nazis. It’s about two years before what we would consider the real genocide of European Jewry, starting with the killing centers, like Chelmno in December, 1941. So this is really one of the first mass murder programs carried out by the Nazis, and it’s carried out on German soil and about 10,000 German children are murdered through the child euthanasia program, usually by overdoses of medication. Then in January 1940, [the Nazis start] a program to kill adult patients in institutions.
Annette: And by then it’s war.
Patricia: Yeah, exactly, this is all done under the cover of war, between January 1940 and August 1941. The Nazis kill about 70,000 patients through gassing. They have six killing centers where they use carbon monoxide gas to gas these individuals. And then there’s a point at which this becomes public knowledge and the program was shut down, at least for adults, until the summer of 1942. And then it [restarts and] continues on until the end of the war. We think there are about 300,000 victims. We can’t be sure of the number, we’re not as sure as we are for Jews, let’s say, where we have a lot of transport lists, but probably about 300,000 patients were murdered
Annette: So between gradually expanding the boundaries of acceptable behavior, even if it’s only among the people participating in the program, to out to the public, and then war comes along, and authoritarianism to its Nth degree. And there’s no one left to protest. Wow.
So, that’s one of the things I think people struggle with a bit is thinking, well, the Nazis came in and [immediately] started killing Jewish people. But that would have been much harder to have done without building toward this goal and building toward this practice. So, I hate changing the subject because this is fascinating and I know everyone else is going to think so too, and it’s horrifying. But it’s really nothing out of the ordinary when you come to the Holocaust Museum, which is to my mind one horror after another, which is what makes it so important. What, apart from historians, what draws people to visit the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC?
Patricia: As you just said, this is a topic that really draws a lot of interest. I think there was a poll that my husband told me about, he’s a historian and well-known to Annette [James Rice, interviewed at NBH] , a poll that said what topics of history really interest Americans. World War Two, and the Holocaust, are the first big things and then there’s a big drop off and then it’s Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.
Annette: Whoa!
Patricia: We have a lot of people who are related to survivors, or know a survivor, but the overwhelming number of people who come to the museum aren’t Jewish and they are maybe not all that interested in the history. But something compels them to come because it’s such an interesting story. We see about 1.5 million guests every year and that tends to go up. We have a lot of school groups, but visitors from out of town, international visitors, really flock to the museum, especially in the summer months, and we do a lot of audience research, and very few people leave unmoved.
Annette: I cannot imagine how anyone could leave unmoved, but I’m glad you’re asking people, what do you think? I think of my own visit to the Holocaust Museum, and it’s been nearly 20 years, I think, which really surprises me. It doesn’t feel that long. I took my young son, possibly a little too young, with me and what finally got him completely and utterly upset was the piles of shoes, from people who’ve been brought to Auschwitz and stripped of absolutely everything, even their dentures and gold fillings.
But for me, the thing that stuck with me most is the two photographs, and I don’t know if they’re still on display because museums change, but the two photographs of the teachers who were about to be shot. One was just staring stoically into the camera, and the other was begging for his life. All of it should resonate with all of us, and does, but some things you just think . . . my goodness, the Nazis marched into Poland and the first people they shot were the intellectuals.
Why do you think that people should go to the museum?
Patricia: For the history, of course. That’s what we historians would say, right? But there are a few reasons that the museum is on the Mall. People ask us, why is there a museum on the [US National Mall] when maybe it’s better to have it in Germany? Now the Germans do have a museum dedicated to six million Jews, but we’re also a museum that reflects on American involvement in the Holocaust, through our liberators [American and other Allied troops who liberated Nazi camps].
That’s very much part of the story, and liberators have always been a part of our constituency, as well as survivors. Of course, that generation is dying out, but we have a lot of testimony from those individuals. We have the flags of liberating units, and also because we want to remind ourselves that, you know, I talked earlier about Weimar [the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the Nazis] being that very frail democracy. And it’s important, the museum is always taking the stand that democracy is a fragile thing, even for one as old and venerable as ours, and that [we need] civic engagement to prevent, those sorts of things, a rise of a dictator along the lines of Hitler. If Germans had been much more engaged in their civic duties, and much more convinced of their own Democratic experiment, this might have happened very differently.
The Holocaust wasn’t inevitable, and I think that’s a big story. Our Permanent Exhibition is being refreshed in the coming years, about next year, I believe. We are starting that physical process of changing the exhibition. And that’s one of the things that we really want to focus on, that the Holocaust and the rise of Hitler were not inevitable, and the duty of citizens to be witnesses and to be engaged in their government.
Annette: You know, something I try to sneak in as much as possible at Non-Boring History is the contingency of history, and to explain what that means. It means what you said, nothing’s inevitable. Why historians are typically and quite rightly reluctant to predict the future is that we’re lousy at it, because we don’t know what will happen. But the idea that the Holocaust was avoidable, that the collapse of democracy in Germany was avoidable.
Certainly, I’m no expert, but my contacts with Germans in my lifetime have always been very interesting. West Germans, mostly, some East Germans, and just the awareness. When I visited Germany in 1981, a long, long time ago now, the guilt was enormous. But there’s still this very conscientious effort to remind themselves.
Again, it comes back to why did people become Nazis? Why did people join the Klan? I mean, these are questions that everyone kind of needs to ask themselves, no matter what they tell themselves how they’re great people, their politics, or anything else. I get why the museum is there, and also it’s a long way to go to Germany or Poland to see anything about the Holocaust.
So you are a historian. Do you have any public-facing role in that job, is your job mostly carrying on with your scholarship?
Patricia: Yes, I have a very public-facing role, and that’s unusual within our Mandel Center. I work within the Mandel Center, it’s the academic wing of the museum. So we are an academic institution within the Holocaust Museum. Nevertheless, the Senior Historian’s role is really public-facing. We are the little office that could! We are a small group of historians that vet everything that the museum produces for historical content, and anything that’s going to be shown as a public program or a book signing, anything in exhibition texts, social media posts. . . . All of those things our office vets, for historical accuracy and content. And then we are content support for the entire Museum: So, say, my colleague who is working right now on the new permanent exhibition has a question, then we’re responsible to answer that.
We’re also responsible for answering anybody in federal agencies who needs something [from us]. That very often happens from the Library of Congress or from the US Army Center for Military History, which is the agency that actually decides who were the liberators of Holocaust sites. This year, we helped the Federal Mint in the Treasury Department strike commemorative Congressional gold medals, because they were going to rescuers of the Holocaust. And then we help scholars, like yourself. We also answer, or we try to answer, questions from the general public as well. So we go from talking to someone like [historian] Richard Evans who might have a question that he needs answered, and we also give regular National History Day interviews to middle schoolers, who need to speak to an historian about their project in order to qualify for National History Day.
Annette: You are the Senior Historian, but how many historians are working under you, Patricia?
Patricia: I’m not the boss of all the other historians
Annette: . . .First among equals . . .?
Patricia: Maybe . . . Nor am I the oldest historian there, by the way.
Annette: I wasn’t going to ask [laughter]
Patricia: But the Senior Historian is a kind of a weird beast. It’s actually a federal appointment, and most federal agencies have a Senior Historian. I know one who was at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The State Department has one. The Treasury Department has one. So many federal agencies actually have a Senior Historian and of course, we have a special kind of duty [at the Holocaust Museum] because we’re a history museum. But only two people report to me.
Annette: So you guys are covering all of this ground, fielding calls from Dr. Richard Evans and a phone call from a third grader somewhere in Tennessee [mimes taking two phone calls simultaneously]. I think that’s an extraordinary thing!
People ask, when they hear that a museum’s permanent exhibit is being redone, why is that? Because the past doesn’t change. I keep telling everybody, history is not the past, history is the interpretation of the past and we change, so the questions we ask change, the documents we have access to change. But why is a museum exhibit in particular changing?
Patricia: Right? And such a successful one. I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? But it’s been there for 30 years, and we know a lot of of things that we didn’t know in 1993 when the museum opened. And the kind of historical gaze that the museum has now has is a little different because history marches on, we ask different questions. And in October 1993, when the exhibit went up, and the museum opened, we really focused on the victims, because there was a lot of, as I talked about earlier, perpetrator history and the victims were not getting a lot of voice at that particular time, at least Holocaust victims. We have a lot of survivors in this country and we wanted to change that.
So if you go into the Museum today, and you look at the permanent exhibition, you’re going to see a very victim-oriented thing where no perpetrators are really named outside the big perpetrators like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, the big names in Nazi Germany. You’re not looking at on- the-ground perpetrators. They’re not named as survivors are named in the exhibition. It’s very Polocentric. If that’s a word, it’s really based on the experience of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. And we know so much more because, with the end of the Cold War, we got so much more documentation, and we were able to tell other parts of the story in other countries. And [the current permanent exhibit] is Auschwitz oriented. And unfortunately also it has very, very small glimpses of subjects like Roma and Sinti. We think about 500,000 Roma and Sinti, so-called gypsies, were murdered and that’s barely a blink in the exhibition. My own subject, the euthanasia program, is in there and people were walking by it and didn’t understand what it had to say or what it was, the way it was depicted in the exhibition.
Annette: We could have a whole discussion about the development of the Museum initially: Edward Linenthal’s book [Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (1995)] on the highly contentious development of the Museum, the many, many people who were trying really hard to figure out what the priorities were, the length of time it took. I used to teach that book, because it shows that museums are not the simple things that people think. Now I’m realizing, I’m going to have to hurry up and come back and take a good old look, for Non-Boring History, at how the museum is now, and hopefully again in a few years.
But I have one very last question. I’m so awed by any historian who works on something as traumatic as the Holocaust. Even just reading a book on the Holocaust always leaves me an absolute wreck. So I want to know how you do it. How do you do this day in and day out , and what kinds of releases do you have in your own life?
Patricia: So I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I’ve been at the Museum 30 years. I started as a child prodigy [laughter] Because I work on the euthanasia program, which is about disabled patients. I do a lot of programs with doctors, and I see something very similar in their approach to their work that I have to mine. It’s very depressing and can be very difficult to look at suffering and trauma. And you have to do your job, you have to be able to focus on your job. I mean, what if you have appendicitis and your doctor says, well, I really don’t want to cut this guy open and take out his appendix. But that’s his job or her job to make you well again. And that’s how he has to do it.
I try to look at it that way, that with the proper . . . distance isn’t the word . . . ,but to know that you’re doing a service by working with this history. And yet, at the same time, because I work with ethicists to teach medical ethics to doctors and continuing medical education courses, and one of the things that we try to instill, and we use the Holocaust for this, is that, as doctors, you want to have a perspective, so that you can help, and that you can do your job. But the same time you mustn’t lose that innate human link to your subjects, and to make a connection with them. So sometimes it is very hard.
The other thing that I think about all the time is the community at the Museum as colleagues, It’s a wonderful community of scholars and administrators and teachers, pedagogues and archivists, and collectors and curators. The atmosphere is very collegial and it’s also one of public service. And so I feel really good connecting with people, who we might be able to give answers to that they need. I’ve had many, many really good experiences where I go home and go “that was a good day” because I was able to give someone the answers that they need to help learn what happened to their relatives, their husband, their children. So, it’s often a very rewarding field to work in as well. I think that’s how I get through. And I do take breaks: There is no Holocaust in my house after 7:00 in the evening (laughter) People often ask me did you see the film on such and such? Did you see The Pianist? Did you see this and that? And I’m like, no. No, I don’t watch those at all.
As you know, I have a little Scottish dog that takes up a lot of my time, a little Westie, whom I love very much ,and I try to take a break when I’m home. I’m somewhere else doing things and try to take joy in every day.
Annette: And I happen to know that you’re an expert on the joys of pandas.
Patricia: That is very true. I’m a bit of a panda historian. We have pandas here in the National Zoo in Washington, and I’m very fond of them. And I also do a panda genealogy, so I have about a 800 page Word document, discussing all the pandas that have ever lived in human care, and I keep that up. That’s sort of my relief valve, so I can do a little bit of fun history, too.
Annette: That’s wonderful. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on. Patricia Heberer Rice, Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC. I do urge you all to go and visit. It’s profound, and it’s a huge subject that should speak to the human being in all of us.
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