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A man and a woman stand within the new Hall of Names, inside the new Holocaust History Museum, both of which are to be inaugurated March 15, at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, in Jerusalem, Friday, March 11, 2005. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners March 14, 2005 |
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Street lamps at Israel's newest Holocaust memorial bear shrapnel holes from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Zyklon B canisters that once supplied gas chambers are piled on the floor. Eyeglasses, shoes, spoons, toothbrushes, diaries and letters that belonged to the victims are on display.
The $56 million, 10-years-in-the-making museum opening this week at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial seeks to provide an intimate look at the individual tragedies of the Nazi genocide.
Inaugural ceremonies on Tuesday and Wednesday will be attended by dozens of world dignitaries, including 15 heads of state and government, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Creators say Yad Vashem's old museum, opened in 1973 and a fourth the size of the new one, was unable to respond to growing international interest in the Holocaust.
A number of Holocaust museums have been built in recent years that are far more elaborate than Yad Vashem. Many Israelis have long felt their memorial was badly in need of a facelift.
This upgrade was funded mostly by private donors but also by the Israeli government and the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Security for the opening ceremonies will be tight, police said in a statement, with hundreds of police and volunteers to be deployed around ceremony venues and hotels housing dignitaries. Jerusalem's bomb squad will conduct numerous sweeps, and major thoroughfares will be closed to traffic.
The creators of the new museum say their aim is to tell the story of the Nazi murder of six million Jews through the Jewish perspective.
Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's chairman and new museum's curator, said the idea was to "build something which is a very personal contact, eye to eye, person to person."
"From the very particular story of the massacre, of the mass murder, of the genocide of the Jewish people ... you will come to the very universal meaning of it," Shalev said. "It was an attack on the very basic human values that are the basis for coexistence, of societies and nations living side by side."
Since most Holocaust photographs were taken by Nazis seeking to portray Jews as subhuman, organizers went to great lengths to recover art work, writings and photographs taken by Jews themselves.
Though some mention is made of the several million non-Jewish victims, the themes overwhelmingly focus on the destruction of European Jewry, with some 90 personal stories woven into the displays to give the grim statistics a human dimension.
A video projected onto the wall of the museum's entrance shows daily Jewish life in Europe in the 1920s and 30s.
Visitors can walk through a typical living room of a Jewish family living in Germany in the 1930s, with furniture and ornaments donated by such families.
A life-size replica of the Warsaw Ghetto's Leszno Street features cobblestones and a tram track from 1940s Warsaw, and lamp posts replete with shrapnel holes from the Jewish uprising -- all donated by the Polish capital.
The museum displays a three-tiered wooden barrack where concentration camp inmates actually slept, a cattle wagon that transported Jews to their deaths and a small fishing boat that ferried Danish Jews to safety in Sweden.
The new museum, designed by Israeli-American architect Moshe Safdie, is a 4,200-square-meter (45,200 sq. feet) prism-like structure that slices through the Jerusalem hilltop known as the Mount of Remembrance.
Underground exhibition galleries on either side of a 200-meter central walkway topped by a skylight guide the visitor through the history of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution: pre-war life, anti-Semitic laws, roundups, deportations, mass executions, death camps.
The museum's creators tried to put the theme of resistance in its proper perspective, avoiding what some believe to be the issue's politicization by Israelis who sought to portray the Jews as fighters rather than victims.
Some critics had complained that the old museum exaggerated the resistance.
About 100 video screens show new survivor testimony, short documentaries and actual footage from the Holocaust.
A survivor on one screen describes the intense fear she felt as a little girl waiting to be transported to a death camp.
"I clung to my mother as we approached the train," she says.
The museum seeks to give insight into the psyche of the perpetrators as well, with black boxes interspersed throughout containing bios and testimonies of key Nazis.
One exhibit gives a moment-by-moment account of an execution of a group of Jewish men by a unit of the so-called Einsatzgruppen in 1941. Photographs taken by members of the unit show the victims being unloaded off trucks in a forest, handed shovels and forced to dig ditches, unaware that the pits will serve as their own graves. Moments later, the men are shot, with doctors then reviewing the corpses to ensure that those still alive are shot again.
"The execution was carried out by rifle fire at a distance of 12 meters," says the unit's report. When the killings were done, it adds, "the unit returned to the camp with a satisfied feeling."
The museum displays excerpts from a famous speech by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and Waffen-SS, to a group of his men.
"Most of you know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000," Himmler says. "To have stood fast through this and, except for cases of human weakness, to have stayed decent, that is what has forged us."
The museum's last exhibit is the Hall of Names, comprised of two cones. One extends 10 meters (yards) upwards and contains 600 photographs of Holocaust victims. Another cone dips deep into the ground, its base filled with water to reflect the images above -- symbolizing Holocaust victims whose names will never be known.
The AP contributed to this report.
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