Alumnus dedicates a lifetime to DC museum

Barbara Abramowitz is the first to admit that her experiences at Hopkins weren't the best.

"It was a mixed bag," she says, sounding slightly tentative despite a brassy Boston accent. "I suppose I shouldn't tell you the whole story." She chuckles.

This is a good joke when you consider that Abramowitz's life has been dedicated to telling the whole story on one of humanity's darkest hours. So it's no surprise when she relents a moment later.

Halfway through a doctorate at Harvard, she relocated to Washington, D.C., only a semester away from completing a minor in Romance Languages. Harvard told her that she could complete her program by taking a quick semester course at Hopkins, so she followed suit, studying Italian at Homewood.

A semester later, Harvard recanted, and Abramowitz, "stuck," as she puts it, switched her allegiance to Hopkins. "I just couldn't compare it favorably to Harvard," she admits, "although the library was nice." She married a Hopkins graduate from "a long line of Hopkins affiliates," so she still gives money.

In 1971, she finished Hopkins with a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature, and found absolutely no job prospects.

"You're probably too young to remember this," she says by way of explanation, employing one of her favorite phrases, and hearkens back to the crippling college campus riots of the late 1960s. Though Homewood during Abramowitz's day never organized mass protests, enough students in enough campuses in enough states called for the cancellation of foreign language requirements that the job market for a newly minted foreign language professor was all but nil.

So she took a job doing what she could, teaching continuing education courses at Georgetown. This lasted until the dean of the program sat her down. "He couldn't stand that I was being underemployed," she says. Abramowitz admits this matter-of-factly, and it's true. To qualify for her doctorate, she had done intense research on the Spanish Inquisition, which left no easy paper trail for a researcher to follow.

The dean knew as much, and urged Abramowitz to do what researchers do: to dig.

"He said that if I could research the Spanish Inquisition, then I could certainly research where the money was in America and who needed it." Abramowitz was directed to the nondescript offices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, a group chartered by Congress to develop a museum chronicling the experiences of those who both perished and survived the world's most famous genocide.

Abramowitz's family had lived in the United States for generations, and had been spared the ghettoization or the brutal efficiency of the camps during World War II. Yet, even without a personal connection, she had drive. "If the museum offices couldn't find enough money within a certain period, then all the congressional funding would be cut. So, after a stint as Director of Research, they made me Director of Major Gifts." It was a role that Abramowitz was uniquely suited for, a combination of researching the citizens and corporations that had money to donate and persuading them that their money would be well spent.

As a founding member of the museum, Abramowitz was uncertain how the reception would be, even for "a worthy project." She found an America alert and willing to donate, regardless of creed or religion. Though she spent her days courting corporations and millionaires for the marquee donations, the donations of everyday, workaholic Americans were unceasing. She remembers a schoolteacher in Maryland in particular. "He took on three jobs to be able to donate $50,000 of his own money."

Then there were the survivors themselves. Two friends, remembering better times in their small Polish community and their friendly Hebrew school, reunited at the concentration camp. Together, they were among the 1,200 Jews on Schindler's proverbial List, spared by businessman Oskar Schindler from death. Immigrating to the United States after the war, they went into business together, as developers. Every community they built had a Schindler Street, or a Schindler Avenue, or a Schindler Road. When Schindler himself went bankrupt in 1958, the two men were among the first to help him back on his feet through a fundraising campaign. When the Holocaust Museum came calling, they opened their pockets, as well.

Abramowitz herself felt what Schindler might have when she visited the concentration camps in Poland. "I felt that I was bearing witness to those who couldn't come back," she says. "We went, the first American trip to Poland sent to discuss the Holocaust, to collect artifacts for the museum."

With her came eighteen others, including senators, ostensibly to visit the American Embassy in Warsaw. Abramowitz wanted them to taste the necessity of a Holocaust remembrance, so she arranged for a next-day tour of Auschwitz. Their guide was a survivor, who pointed out the wooden plank bunk she had slept on, awaiting execution. Abramowitz could liken it only to a "bunk bed, but without a mattress," the mundane turned to the cruel.

The senators, in particular, were "overwhelmed" by the visit. As the tour concluded, Senator Allan Cranston, of California, stepped forward and began to talk. He told of his career as a journalist in Germany in the 1930's, how he had returned to New York before the war began. He continued, telling how he was walking through Macy's, the book department, and he noticed copies of a book he knew all too well from his trip to Germany stacked on a table, waiting to be sold. It was Mein Kampf, Hitler's epic rant, but, Cranston explained, far too small to the book itself. He flipped through the copy. Every reference to the smoldering hatred and anti-Semitism of the author was excised, cleaned up for American audiences. Within days, Cranston had hired a translator and a secretary, and began to publish bootleg copies of the book. Hitler sued for copyright infringement, and won a resounding court victory. But Cranston had the upper hand. With his book priced at 10 cents a copy, he had made the man's vitriol available to all of America.

Abramowitz watched the reaction of the group, none of whom had known of the senator's run-in with the Fuhrer. She had known, of course, since it was her business to know- and was pleased with their reaction, the surprise and awe amid the relics of genocide.

She did not know, however, that the acrimonious fight that would follow the return from Poland, the fight between Gypsies, Poles, Armenians over what content the museum would hold, would be solved by a spirited black schoolteacher. As the in-fighting spread between the groups, Dorothy Height, head of the National Association of Negro Women, stood up. "The museum must be about the Jews," Abramowitz remembers her saying. "From the particular you get the universal."

In the end, Height was right. Abramowitz sees it today when visitors tour the Museum she was instrumental in creating. From the particular events of the Holocaust, the Museum has launched awareness campaigns against all genocide the world over, most recently focusing their efforts towards the roiling war in Darfur. Holocaust memorials cropped up in many cities with the advent of the museum, including Baltimore.

Abramowitz, though retired now, can't shake her optimism. "If there is one thing I've learned from doing this work, it's that Americans are very generous people who are willing if not anxious to give their money to good causes. With the proper leadership, there is nothing America cannot fix. We have the means and the will just waiting."