A near-forgotten story of smuggled jewels and midnight escapes led museum curator Evangeline Jarman to a PhD examining Australia’s Holocaust museums and what we can learn from them about bearing witness to difficult histories.
Evangeline’s PhD journey began in 2020 when she was asked to write a four-page report on a collection at the Western Australian Museum. The collection, of more than 300 pieces, had been donated to the museum by Shirley Stanwix, who as a child escaped from Germany to Perth with her family. Evangeline’s report ended up being 80 pages long – leading a colleague to suggest she turn it into a thesis.
As her PhD progressed, Evangeline found it shifting from a histories perspective to a museums perspective. In 2019, Australia had joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, leading to funding being directed towards museum projects commemorating the Holocaust. These projects began coming to fruition during Evangeline’s candidature. “By 2026 there will be a Holocaust museum in every state and territory in the country,” she explains. “And, by 2026, ninety-five percent of the Holocaust survivors who made their home here after the war will have passed away.” This led Evangeline to wonder, “How do we bear witness to the Holocaust, how do we express that memory, how do we share it, transmit it, engage with it, when we don’t have the survivors? I’m looking at all the ways that museums are doing that.”
The question of how to remember significant events in a “post-survivor world” has been around since the Holocaust itself. And asking what happens when no witnesses remain to tell the story has implications far beyond that event. “I would love to see us studying these [Holocaust] museums as ways of witnessing,” Evangaline says.
“We can look at the different ways in which an Australian museum can witness something very difficult, really uncomfortable, and quite controversial and ethically contentious, and use that to say: In a theoretical world, what would it look like if we witnessed First Nations genocide? What would it look like if we witnessed the oppression against the queer community? What would it look like if we applied all of what we know about this to different marginalised groups?”
Evangeline is excited by the way museums are constantly innovating and trying to find new ways to tell these stories and to attract and engage visitors using new technology, such as AI witnessing and virtual reality.
“It’s a really interesting collision of core tensions that are very old, and new mechanisms to engage with them.”
Museums are considering what is it about these stories of Holocaust, genocide and survival that has continuing relevance to the audiences they are trying to attract – for example, in Adelaide and Melbourne, museums are targeting young people, touching on big questions in a way that is deliberately structured to reach that group. The Tasmanian Holocaust Interpretation and Education Centre is confronting a very dark but core part of their history by navigating the story of genocide in Tasmania. “They are leaning in,” says Evangeline. “They are embracing the past by drawing parallels, bringing in diverse perspectives, and asking ‘What can one story tell us and reveal about the other? How do they talk to us?’ The mechanisms and speed [of genocide] change, but people still suffer.” This perspective highlights the ongoing relevance of these events – they aren’t a static moment in time but are ongoing experiences for different groups, even in a post-survivor context.
Beyond the deep and difficult questions confronted in her work, Evangeline also faced the day-to-day challenges of undertaking a big research project. “Confirmation rarely survives collision with reality!” she reflects. It’s a good reminder that discovering your voice as a researcher can take some time – but it is time well spent. “You can’t waste time,” she says. “Time’s not a resource the way money is – you can’t hoard it and you can’t lose it … you haven’t wasted time, you’ve used it.”
One significant moment for Evangeline came about halfway through her candidature, when she visited Auschwitz for the first time while undertaking fieldwork. She had been wrestling with the experience of visiting sites of terrible violence and how “it was really hard. And then it stopped being really hard and – even more scary – it became really easy. You start to become so desensitised to it.” She arrived at Auschwitz on a clear, sunny day and was struck by the beauty of the grounds. “It was chilling. It punctured the apathy.”
Evangeline has recently submitted her thesis and is excited to get back to curatorial museum work. “I want to apply this stuff! I want to think about how to puncture that apathy for other people. I built a resistance to it – knowing what I know and knowing how important these histories are – and I figured out a way to puncture that for myself … I want to share that!”
To other candidates, Evangeline points out that “everyone thinks they are the fraud.” She believes the best way to combat imposter syndrome is to trust the people around you – your supervisors, friends and family. “If I couldn’t trust my own perception, I had to trust them … they wouldn’t be investing time in me if they didn’t think I could do it.”
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