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ilewish Press
Orthodox Jewry loses leader Page 5.
Serving Nebraska and Iowa Since 1920
2 lYAR, 5753 Friday, April 23,1993
Vol. LXX No. 29 Omaha
The U.S. Holocaust museum, the power of bearing witness By Fredda Sacharow Philadelphia Exponent WASHINGTON (JTA) — If you stand in the Hall of Witness at the new U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and feel, unsettled, disoriented or overwhelmed, architect James Ingo Freed will have done his job. The space is vast. You look at the wide stairway leading to the second floor, with its sides converging at the top, and think of the railroad tracks to Auschwitz. The brick shapes of the doorways surrounding you evoke the openings to the ovens. A glass crack in the floor, running the length of the hall, reminds you that a vast, man-made earthquake ruptured Europe six decades ago: The room's materials are cold: steel, concrete, granite. The feeling here is one of hollowness, of something nameless and terrible looming. If you come away from .this place shaken, thinking you probably won't return soon, but feeling right that you made the decision to invest the time, project director Michael Berenbaum will have done his job. "I want people to say, 'It's not a place I want to come back to, but I'm proud of myself for being here,' " says Berenbaum, the author, historian and former newspaperman who has overseen every step of the museum since before its October 1988 groundbreaking. On a recent visit, two workmen on scaffolding stood painting the soaring inside walls of the Hall of Remembrance, where visitors will end their tour of dehumanization, death and defiance, and pause to recite Kaddish, pray, light a candle. Dust motes fill the air, visible'in the early spring sunlight that streams through the triangular skylights — designed after the identifying patches the Nazis forced Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals to wear in the camps. Located on 1.9 acres of federally donated land on Raoul Wallenberg Plaza, next to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Muaeunt was authorized by an act of Congress in 1980. Outside the hall — where you can look to your left and see the stately Jefferson Monument and to your right to the elegant spire that honors George Washington — another worker, in a red flannel shirt and dusty jeans was finishing engraving the words Ronald Reagan spoke at the laying of the museum's cornerstone'in 1988: •^e who 4jd not go their way owe them this: We must make sure their deaths have posthumous meaning. We must make sure that from now until the end of days, all humankind stares this evil in the face. And only then can be we sure that it will never rise again." On tlie fourth floor, the videos that will tell the story of the liberation of the death'camps were not yet installed, and eavy gray plastic sheeting still covered many of the exbiU. But on the third floor, the wooden barracks fVom Birkenau — the actual wood, no reproduction — were
already In place. The railroad boxcar that transported Jews horn 'Warsaw to Treblinka stands empty and dark inside, ready for the visitors to feel for themselves the claustrophobic horror of its blank walls. And the chilling casting of the al|-too-familiar wrought-iron inscription "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you f^) that greeted new inmates at Auschwitz with its mocking irony — that, too, was ready. So are the tapes.
"We who did not go their way owe them this: We mu&t make sure their deaths have posthumous meaning..." When the museum opens Monday, visitors will sit on narrow benches in front of a mural of Auschwitz/Birkenau and listen to what one museum official calls "audio theater" — the voice of men and women who were there and who remember • Walking naked through the hallways of the barracks while Nazi overseers "looked at our breasts and our bellies"; • Watching in horror as a number — 65316 — is tattooed in blue ink on a bare wrist; • Peeling newly shorn hair "falling in my face and mingling with my tears"; • Jockeying for position on a narrow cot — a plank, really — with five other people, no pillow, no mattress; • Falling out for morning roU-call, where hundreds of emaciated bodies — 'still warm" — are piled carelessly in front of the barracks. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has been 13 yaacaand $160 million in the making. Far^,ftn»n>Mlum, the daunting challenge was to create a facility that would tell these stories in all their starkness, yet still provide a museum that would attract the average tourist in shorta and polo shirt, camera slung around his. neck. Or, as he puts it, "How do you take visitors off the National Mall and take them back 50 years to a time of horror and unspeakable evil?" The answer, Berenbaum believes, lies partly in presenting the Holocaust through American eyes. A visitor to the museum will enter through the 7,500square-foot HaU of Witness, and be steered toward a' bank of elevators.' Panoramas on each elevator and the recorded voices of American soldiers will re-create the day of April 11, 1945 — the liberation of Buchenwald. Doors then will open on the museum's fourth floor, .where graphic pictures of the camps line the walls and the tour Uirough history and horror begins.
Visitors will actually take a 76-foot visual journey that mirrors what Berenbaum calls the "journey of the Jews from citizens to outcasts." Or, he adds succinctly, "demarcation, deportation, death." The space here is designed to confuse and confound; nothing is what it seems. Aisles end in barricades; horizontal striped bars force detours. Passageways narrow suddenly, controlling and limiting movement. None of this is accidental, Berenbaum confirms. As you leam of Germany's increasingly harsh treatment of its minorities — among them the- mentally retarded, the infirm, the politically dissident — you feel increasingly trapped, queasy. You see vivid portrayals of book burnings of 1933 and, ultimately, of the glassedged horrors of Kristallnacht, 1938. You descend to the third floor. Here, a visitor will tread on the authentic cobblestones that lined the Warsaw Ghetto, and view a remarkable mock-up of the Lodz Ghetto, created by a shoemaker named Leon Jacobson and smuggled out in a suitcase by a survivor determined to document history. • Here, too, is the stained-glass window from Krakow's synagogue; there is the Scroll of Esther that Rabbi Leo Baeck read one dark Purim in Theresienstadt. It was on this floor, Berenbaum says, that museum designers confronted one of their most chilling questions: "How do you tell an X-rated story to a G-rated audience?" This time, the answer came firom a panel of ed-. ucational psychologists — 5-foot-high "privacy walls" that shield the horrors from too-young eyes, while allowing adults to see the corpses at Babi Yar, for example, or the mutilated bodies that came out of the ovens. In this area are the artifacts that defined the systematic destruction of a people: 4,000 shoes, 15,000 pounds of human hair left when Auschwitz was liberated. And then, a stunning tower of photos. Yaffa Sonenson Bliach was 4 years old when the Continued on page 4
Yom Ha'atzmaut Sunday, April 25 Schedule of Events laKX)
OPENING CERMONY
12 • 1
Israel Treasure Hunts (starting promptly at noon)
r^-'-J:16 Food "Shuk". Obtain a JCAC Passport. Preschool Israeli Art Activities Israel Information Booths Visit the Western Wall . Gan Hayiot (Petting Zoo) Israel Art Projects 12:15 - lf46 "Mr. Klezmer" Lionel Wolberger 1.-00
OMAHA/ISRAEL SPECTACULAR 45
2:46
OMAHA/ISRAEL SPECTACULAR 45
Baxter to invest
Operation Exodus at work J«w« iv«cu«d by UM .l«wl«h Agency ftpom itthnlc otvll war tn Bukhuoil, (Iwirgla, In the foroMr on arrival at B«n Uurion Airport In UMML TIM rMOua wu mad* poMlbl* Ihanlw to 8ov .oduafunda. Photo by UJA/D.R. Outhria. ^ Op. iiil E^L't^iii--_B
By Deborah Kalb. StatM News Service WASHINGTON (JTA) — Baxter International Inc., the Illinoii-based madlcal supply company aMawad a record fine laat month by the U.S. government for complianca with tha Arab bdycott of larael, hai agreed to Invest $10 million In tha Jewish state. Under terms of a com- , binad satUomant of three shareholder suita brought against Baxter in the past two years, the company will, within flve years. Invest the money In research and development prefects In Israel, Baiter spokesman GeoflWty Fm ton said.
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