March 16, 2005
The Holocaust at Human Scale
New Museum in Jerusalem Reflects Change in Israelis' Perspective on Tragedy
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
JERUSALEM, March 15 -- The grainy black-and-white photographs of death shock the senses. But it is the personal remnants of life that wrench the heart -- a red-and-white polka-dot bow from a little girl's dress, a postcard flung from a cattle car by a desperate mother, an entry scrawled in a diary one horrible day more than 60 years ago.
"A sight that I will never forget as long as I live," Abraham Lewin, a teacher in Warsaw, wrote on Sept. 11, 1942. "Five tiny children, 2- and 3-year-olds, sit on a cot in the open field. . . . They bellow and scream without stopping. . . . 'Mommy, Mommy, I want to eat!' The soldiers are shooting continually and the shots silence the children's crying for a moment."
Lewin's diary, the little red bow and a vast array of other personal items displayed in the new Holocaust History Museum -- inaugurated by Israel on Tuesday -- represent a dramatic transformation in this country's attitudes toward the dominant event in modern Jewish history, according to historians and museum organizers.
Historians say it is the kind of museum that Israel could not have contemplated 32 years ago, when its predecessor opened. Emotions were still raw then, families of Holocaust victims weren't psychologically ready to give up personal mementos, and the Israeli national consciousness centered on the entire Jewish community rather than on individuals.
"Until a few years ago, we looked at the Holocaust as a phenomenon of the collective," said Dalia Ofer, a professor of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "We never thought of how each individual person who was consigned to life in the ghetto tried to live his life. This doesn't take away the importance of the collective . . . but another element has been added."
"We're putting individuals at the center, delivering history through personal stories," said Avner Shalev, chief curator of the $56 million museum, which took a decade to plan and build.
Prime ministers, presidents and other officials representing 40 countries -- the largest representation of foreign dignitaries to visit Jerusalem since the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, according to Israeli officials -- assembled Tuesday on a forested mountaintop just outside Jerusalem for the museum's inauguration. The new facility, like its predecessor, is part of the Yad Vashem memorial, which also includes an art museum and centers for Holocaust study and research.
The old Holocaust History Museum, the world's first museum dedicated to the Holocaust when it opened in 1973, depicted events in horrific but static black-and-white photographs accompanied by long blocks of text. Most faces were anonymous. Many places were nameless. Exhibits focused on the German perpetrators and depicted the victims primarily through the lenses of the perpetrators' cameras.
In the new museum, the survivors and the dead tell their stories through scribbled notes, vivid paintings, children's games, family photographs and concentration camp uniforms. The sweep of history is packaged into intimate moments and personal accounts.
"If you think about it, the number of about 6 million people doesn't say anything," said Dan Michman, chief historian at the Yad Vashem center, referring to the number of Jews believed to have perished during the Holocaust. "It is through the individual that you can learn something."
With its 100 movie and plasma screens, flashy maps and graphic presentations, the museum is also designed for a new generation of visitors.
"The audience has been changing," Shalev said. "We had to think forward to the change of generations. The third and fourth generations will not have the privilege to meet survivors. We're trying to build a bridge between these incidents and their lives. We let them come to personal conclusions on the preservation of Jewish life."
Officials began planning the new museum just after the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993. The Washington museum strongly emphasized personal stories, issuing identity cards to visitors so they could track the fates of individuals as they ventured through the museum. In recent years, Holocaust museums have proliferated around the world and international interest in the events surrounding the Holocaust has surged.
"Israel certainly thinks that it should have the central memorial or museum for the Holocaust," said Ofer, the Hebrew University professor. "I don't think we would have created such a museum, such a revolutionary project, if Yad Vashem didn't face this challenge of other museums throughout the world."
Israeli museum officials and historians combed through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and diaries in the vast Yad Vashem archives, matching them with photographs of victims. They collected more than 2,500 artifacts, including part of a cattle car used to transport victims, scarred wooden bunk beds from Auschwitz and a rusted soup vat from Gross-Rosen, two Nazi camps in occupied Poland. The goal, officials said, was to humanize an event long depicted exclusively in terms of its dehumanizing elements.
Warsaw, which is redeveloping its original Jewish ghetto, donated hundreds of original cobblestones and yards of trolley tracks to re-create a scene from Leszno Street, complete with a lamppost gouged by shrapnel and a wooden bench missing a few slats.
As museum visitors stroll down the street, doorways open into homes and businesses, including a theater where a movie titled "The Wife of the Rabbi" was playing. Photographs of men in tattered coats and of emaciated, sobbing children flash across walls, and the sounds of shouting voices and clattering hoofs are piped through the hall.
While the museum is dedicated primarily to the experience of Jews, it also reflects changes in historical interpretation of events of the time.
"Forty or fifty years ago, we tended to put the emphasis on Hitler as being a grand architect who designed everything and gave orders," said historian Michman. "We now know he was important, but he only set the framework. The collaboration of many spheres in the bureaucracy and among the German and European population was the major reason why so many people could have been exterminated."
Interspersed throughout the exhibits in the 45,000-square-foot museum are notes and letters written by low-level German military officers that illustrate complicity at lower levels of the Nazi bureaucracy. Beneath photographs of members of the Einsatzgruppen unit shooting men who had been forced to dig their own graves in a forest clearing near Belgrade in October 1941, curators have placed this notation from the unit's records: "The execution was carried out by rifle fire at a distance of 12 meters. . . . 180 people were shot. Everything was concluded by 6:30 p.m. The unit returned to the camp with a satisfied feeling."
After traversing the museum's depictions of death camps, death marches and death trains, of struggles for survival and searches for lost family members, visitors emerge from the gray concrete hallway onto a cantilevered balcony with a view of forested hillsides and a sudden blast of p ine-scented breezes.
"We end it without any statement," said Yehuda Bauer, one of Israel's most renowned professors of Holocaust studies, who helped conceptualize the new museum. "You simply go out to the balcony and look at Jerusalem. You don't need to say anything more. No verbal message, no lesson. You just go out and see for yourself."
Researcher Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
