Switzerland Guide
Geneva
Musée International de la Croix-Rouge
Housed within the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge is acclaimed as one of the best museums in Europe. Using video displays and interactive technology (always with an English-language option), it chronicles the history of modern conflict, and the role the Red Cross has played in providing aid to combatants and civilians caught up in war and natural disasters. The displays are strikingly affecting, always using clear single images instead of swamping you with facts and figures, and avoiding judgement or ideological point-scoring.
You enter through a trench in the hillside, emerging into an enclosed glass courtyard, surrounded by reflected images of yourself beside a group of stone figures, bound and blindfolded, representing the continual worldwide violation of human rights. The museum's audioguide takes you through the eleven undemarcated sections, all packed into a small floor area, which piece together in chronological order the history of kindness, from the Good Samaritan and Saladin to the experiences of nineteenth-century Genevan businessman Henri Dunant which prompted him to found the Red Cross. In one area of the museum are ranged aisle after aisle of record cards from World War I – an astonishing seven million of them – detailing prisoners' particulars in order that they could be traced and reunited with their families. In another is a reconstructed cell, 3m by 2m, which an ICRC delegate reported housed seventeen prisoners: 34 footprints on the cell floor only go some way towards helping imagine the conditions. Also memorable is the eye-opening Wall of Time, an ingenious representation of those wars and natural disasters which have killed more than 100,000 people, year by year since the Red Cross's foundation: as you reach the second half of the last century, the dizzyingly long lists of wars around the world tell their own, sombre story.
Address: 17 Avenue de la Paix
Opening time: Mon & Wed– Sun 10am–5pm
Price: Fr.10, audioguide Fr.5
Website: www.micr.org