http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/ny...l?ref=nyregion
For 9/11 Museum, Dispute Over Victims’ Remains
An artist's rendering of a memorial at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
April 1, 2011
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IN one of the haunting legacies of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the remains of 1,123 of the victims, 41 percent of the total, have not been identified, leaving many of their relatives yearning for closure. At the same time, nearly 10 years later, 9,041 pieces of human remains — mainly bone fragments but also tissue that has been dehydrated for preservation — are still being sorted through by the city’s medical examiner for DNA, though the last time a connection was made was in 2009.
Now, a dispute over what to do with those fragments of humanity is simmering between some of the victims’ families and the officials planning the National September 11 Memorial and Museum underneath where the twin towers stood.
Officials plan to take the grisly souvenirs seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel. But the families, appalled by the idea of remains that could belong to their loved ones being turned into a lure for tourists, want them kept in a separate above-ground memorial that would be treated like hallowed ground.
“To allow remains to be put in a museum, really for gawkers,” marveled Sally Regenhard, the mother of a 28-year-old probationary firefighter and aspiring writer, Christian, who died on Sept. 11, 2001. “I personally feel I’ve been robbed of access to where my son’s remains are potentially being buried. My entire family, we will never go in there. This is a post-traumatic stress situation waiting to happen.”
How to handle remains is one of the most delicate questions that confront those trying to commemorate the darker chapters of human history. Over the past 20 years, museums across the country have grappled with how to repatriate Native American skeletons, scalps and bones to their tribal heirs, as prescribed by a 1990 federal law. At its inception, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington debated whether to display human hair from the Nazi death camps, and decided not to when some survivors felt it would be offensive.
In Oklahoma City, unidentified remains of the 168 victims of the 1995 bombing are buried under a grove of 168 trees on the State Capitol complex — two and a half miles from the museum chronicling the events. In Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, only family members are allowed access to the crash site, which is assumed to contain some remains of the 40 passengers and crew members, though there will eventually be an elaborate memorial open to the public surrounding it. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, ashes from the Nazi death camps are kept in the Hall of Remembrance, separate from the museum, which turns away people who bring remains from the fields surrounding the camps.
“We are not dealing with anatomy,” said Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem’s chairman. “This is our policy.”
The plan at the World Trade Center is for the remains to be invisible and inaccessible to the public, museum officials said; an adjoining room will be available to victims’ families for contemplation and grief. Although people would have to enter the museum to get to the remains, the remains will technically be in the custody of the medical examiner, so that they may be removed for future testing.
Alice Greenwald, the museum’s director, said that because the museum would be at ground zero, it had a special place in history.
“Yad Vashem is not the site of an atrocity,” Ms. Greenwald said. “When you go to the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, when you go to genocide museums all around Rwanda, there have been decisions in those places to present corpses, skulls, evidence of human remains. When you go to Auschwitz, the entire facility is made up of human remains.
“Most American museums have not confronted the particular issue that we are dealing with here,” she added. “The only place one could repatriate those remains to is the World Trade Center site.” Indeed, Ms. Greenwald said that was what a “majority of families have actually said over the years” that they wanted.
Certainly, not all of the victims’ relatives oppose the plan: some are on the museum’s board. The dissenting families, including some of the most active and vocal leaders of the victims’ groups that sprang up in the aftermath of the attack, say that they supported a plan for placing the remains in something akin to the Tomb of the Unknowns, separate from the museum, but that they were shocked to learn that instead they would be housed near the main exhibition spaces.
Several families said that officials sent letters to the heirs of all 2,752 victims, asking for the proper spelling of their names for panels that would adorn the memorial plaza, but that they learned of the new plan only by chance, when they attended a presentation about the museum at St. Paul’s Chapel, in Lower Manhattan, in 2009.
“The names were important to us, of course, but what could be more important than our loved ones’ remains?” asked Rosaleen Tallon, whose brother, Sean, a probationary firefighter, was killed when the north tower collapsed.
Those upset about the plans contacted David Hurst Thomas, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who then brought in Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, an expert on the repatriation of Native American remains at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh dismissed the argument from museum officials that the remains would be hidden, saying that the Virgil quotation meant “they are essentially incorporating the human remains room into the visitor experience.” He also raised the question of consent, noting that in the celebrated “Body Worlds” exhibitions, every individual whose body was put on display had signed a form giving permission.
“We know none of those individuals gave their consent to be on display or part of a museum exhibit,” Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh said of the 9/11 victims. “And we know there are lineal descendants and people in this community who are saying, ‘We want a role in this,’ and yet their requests for meaningful consultation are being denied to them.”
Shortly after the two curators circulated a nationwide petition among their colleagues, “trying to apply some pressure” on the museum, Dr. Colwell-Chanthaphonh said, officials contacted them. “They said we were being manipulated by the advocacy groups, that there was another side to the story and that we needed to talk to them.”
The curators and family groups met in June, but were unable to come to a resolution. As the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches — and, with it, the scheduled opening of the first part of the memorial — concern is resurfacing.
To Rosemary Cain, who lost her firefighter son, George, putting the remains in the same space as the museum is “like a freak show.” Ms. Regenhard said she imagined having to squeeze past hordes of museum-goers, retracing the steps of victims trying to escape the burning World Trade Center, to get to what may be her son’s remains.
Joe Daniels, the memorial and museum’s president, disagreed. “What the families need most and what the public needs most is a memorial they can come to to pay their respects at,” he said, “and a museum where they can come to learn about events; not reopening decisions that were made in the past.”
While many of those who have dealt with these issues elsewhere expressed surprise at New York’s plan, they also acknowledged that ground zero presented some unique challenges.
Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, said that “human remains are not objects that get curated and displayed,” but added that the Sept. 11 project “is a museum on a site of mass death,” putting it “into a whole other category.”
“One of the ongoing tensions is balancing the educational goal with the goal of always honoring the memory of the victims,” Ms. Bloomfield added. “Those sometimes come into conflict, and it requires a lot of sensitivity and building a lot of dialogue and trust with your constituency, in our case Holocaust survivors. I don’t think there’s any one clear-cut answer.”
Piotr M. A. Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said that “every authentic memorial site has something of a museum and a cemetery in itself.”
“Both roles should be present and clearly recognizable, yet they should not be confused and mixed,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We cannot turn back the time just as we cannot free the space around Auschwitz-Birkenau from human ash and tiny remains of human bones. There is no sense in creating some artificial order and peace on a land contaminated with extreme evil.”
In the final analysis, he said, “it’s important to respect the human dignity of the victims and sensitivity of the living.”
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