Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

In the postwar period, Montreal, Canada, became home to the world’s third largest community of Holocaust survivors outside of Europe. And yet their stories as well as their relationships to the city are not well known. Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home After the Holocaust (www.refugeeboulevard.ca) is a multimedia project that begins to fill this void by situating the postwar stories of six child survivors in the spaces they inhabited upon arriving to the city in 1948 through the War Orphans Project. This free, bilingual, survivor-led audio tour, which has an accompanying booklet and website, resulted from an innovative college-community-university partnership between Dawson College, the Montreal Holocaust Museum, and Saint Paul University. It enables participants to intimately listen to survivors’ memories and walk in their footsteps while experiencing the Mile End and Plateau neighbourhoods, which were at the heart of Montreal’s Jewish community at the time. This paper discusses the project’s methodology and how revisiting interviews done for past testimony projects, conducting new interviews, and completing extensive research in local archives led to new understandings of their postwar experiences. We argue that this unique process as well as the decade-long relationships we have sustained with some of our survivors allowed us to generate new knowledge and disseminate it to various publics in an innovative and accessible way. Our reflections connect with all of the conference’s major themes by speaking to how a museum initiative which takes place on local streets impacts visitors and highlights intangible heritage.