Our nation has a long and proud history of Americans answering the call to serve. Today, we pause to remember the 138,000 POW’s and 83,000 MIA’s from WWII to the present day during this, America’s National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

The American Heritage Museum is humbled to have been chosen to display a somber reminder of perhaps the most well-known of all of the POW camps in Vietnam, the Hỏa Lò Prison or as it is more colloquially known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”

With great foresight and appreciation of the historic significance of these cells a donor made sure that the most important of these cells were disassembled, brick by brick, slab by slab, and preserved for posterity before the remaining parts of the prison were raised in the mid-1990s.

Today only a handful of these cells survive at the original Hanoi Hilton along with the ones that will be carefully reassembled at the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Ma. This portion of the “Hilton” known as “Heartbreak Hotel” was the section where most of the downed flyers spent their first weeks of captivity, enduring the peak of their horrific and grueling physical and mental torture. We are solemnly committed to ensuring the personal war for survival and sacrifice of these brave men shall never be forgotten.

The AHM is honored to be able to keep their legacy alive for future generations and look forward to the future opening of this gallery that will preserve their courage, valor, and bravery.