B M COULOMBE an article

 

 

A little about me, founder of BMC Museum; B.M.Coulombe

Hello, my name is B.M. Coulombe, I have always been strongly intrigued by the Second World War, more particularly the Nazi Holocaust. In School, I found myself distraught, seeing color in photographs that everyone else saw black and white – looking into a mirror almost, as the facts and figures being set before me jumped into vividly flitting scenes of daily life – I could see the subtle things long consumed ; and understand individual worlds over seen then seemed by none aside me but time and kept alive but behind the eyes of those who’d survived. It was as if I’d been set on the wrong side of the glass in every museum I’d visited, always keeping quiet but wanting to explain, as the monotonous tour or lesson droned on with the same statistical numbers and general statements to shape and compress history into the hour, and thus rendering it meaningless .

I had so long observed how the war, as with all history (and more particularly society’s deemed less desirable parts) was represented in common education. What I observed simply was an incomplete picture, a confusing and disengaged mess of forced memorization and trivial facts learned if only briefly for the passing of a test and in total disregard to the real voices of war and genocide. In short, the relatable aspects, the humanity behind those facts and figures I saw slipping away, becoming lost in the mere few generational divides that separate our learning generation from what to their grandparents, and for some now great grandparents was all too real.

Fast forward  a few of years ago and after a few prior of collecting, I found that I had acquired quite a vast (and always growing) collection of artifacts of daily life; nameless portraits and various articles that time had left behind –  dusty old things forgotten and shown up without heirs. To many  they seemed to be just simple old things, but to me they told their endless stories, each a looking glass through the eyes of different sides of wartime European life, and too the Nazi Holocaust. Then as I am now, an avid scholar and Second World War collector, I kept these things in a massive private collection until I was first inspired to found BMC Museum.  Aside my always fascination with the European theatre, it was my seeing of the desperate need for tangible education. What I had observed years earlier and had become so distraught with –  that being that we all learn a predetermined assortment of figures and facts but still were so distant from them that we ceased to learn the realism of the past that our ancestors lived and how without history there would have been no future, none of what we presently call our own. Thus was born a motto of sorts, two sentences that describe everything I and my museum stand for. “Remembering the war’s unknown and forgotten. Humanizing the facts and figures.”

The  Mission of B.M.C Museum

 That said, I strive to bring back a sort of emotional tangibility to learning about the war and Nazi Holocaust. Explaining history through the eerily left ambiance, the silence aloud – the absence that surrounds each remnant of stolen lives, teaching rather that we must not solely listen but let for a moment our daily chatter subside and quite simply see, think, feel something as seemingly insignificant as a left behind bit of tattered clothing or long left nameless portrait; take a moment to truly hear that all-consuming silence, the stillness, the one voice that force could not take. I believe that in that we can truly discover history, taking no more than a moment, even if just to pause and think, to see that the remnants time’s left behind are so much more, that they are in fact each subtle reminders of someone’s everything – entire realities, lives no different than ours completely consumed by the hands of faces all the while beside them – their worlds engulfed by those within their own.  

To conclude, B.M.C. Museum strives to ensure the war’s unknowns and forgotten will never become any less than human. To paint in those black and white portraits and thus revive the humanity behind the detachment of generalized figures and facts so often used to define what was once to it’s people just as real as any of we are to another. Entire existences, frighteningly easily wiped from the earth as if never so, lives unlived and simply gone. With B.M.C Museum I can help preserve the subtle reminders of their worlds consumed, and speak the individual stories of stolen voices through the remnants of their lives.

Remembering those things that often sadly all some want to do is forget, for it is an unfortunate truth that our era will see the last of the eyes to witness such atrocity.  The last of the voices that bring the all too close to home feeling to history, that almost tangible humanity and accounts of  a stolen normalcy not unlike that which we often today take for granted. The faces and voices each one for all unknowns and forgotten, that too would without a heritage of remembrance become in time merely names, then nothing, as so much of even fairly current history does . In fact, the truth of history itself, (and more so it’s darkest chapters) would be gone if not for a new insight –  if not for a museum not of statistical information embellished by it’s artifacts of standard fare, but a museum of less common artifacts – pieces of the very fabric of lives, worlds, families never gotten to know posterity, merely embellished by the statistics. And thus is my mission, a mission to teach not  merely the facts used to define history in broad generalizations but individual humanities, untold stories of the voiceless through the subtle things they left behind. So that we may be their legacy, their remembrance when no one is left to remember, so that we may know a new sort of history, made up of each intimately human moment once lived, and that we may know we travel each day again over their time worn footsteps, but never end up in their shoes.