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Morrie and Gary Schwartz
and the staff of
MORRIE'S
The Holocaust Era
Becoming Appropriated
Service Center, Inc.
ANDREW SILOW CARROLL
Special to The Jewish News
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(JAmerican Heart Association
ou are led by corn-
puter-synchronized
light, color and sound
through a succession of tab-
leaus that take you back in
time. You are in Europe
before and during the Holo-
caust. You hear the actual
words of the victims, the vic-
timizers, the heroes and the
apathetic bystanders.
"As a searchlight comes on
— you are at a replica of the
gates of Auschwitz . . ."
A scene from the "The
Twilight Zone"? No, a
brochure describing an ex-
hibit at the $38 million-plus
Museum of Tolerance being
built by the Simon Wiesen-
thal Center in Los Angeles.
For Wiesenthal Center
Dean Marvin Hier and his
defenders, the museum's
high-tech, multi-media ap-
proach to commemoration
will teach young people
about the Holocaust in the
language they understand
best, and make them begin
to ask the question, "How
could human beings sink to
such depths of depravity? "
But for critics, the planned
museum is nothing less than
a Holocaust Disneyland.
"He was tremendously
impressive," said Holocaust
author Sharon Miller of Hier
during a recent conversation
at a friend's home in
Georgetown. "Many people
have questioned his motives,
although virtually everyone
was afraid to do so publicly
because Marvin Hier plays
hardball. But I was struck
when I met him by what I
think is his utter sincerity,
and the sincerity of his
effort.
"Be that as it may," she
continued, "I do not feel
comfortable with the kind of
commemoration that he is
trying to pay. I do not feel
comfortable with the Holo-
caust being used as the vehi-
cle for these huge fund-
raising dinners for his
center, the `celebratization'
of the Holocaust."
Ms. Miller's new book,
One, by One, by One, is about
the way nations and in-
dividuals abuse or misuse
the memory of the Holo-
caust.
According to Ms. Miller,
who is the New York Times'
deputy media editor and a
Andrew Silow Carroll is a
reporter for the Washington
Jewish Week.
former Cairo bureau chief,
each of the six countries she
visited in researching the
book has a "particular na-
tional form of self-deception
. . . which triumphs over self-
revelation."
Austrians, for example,
still refuse to acknowledge
the significant role that
their country played in the
Holocaust, and the French
remain bitterly divided over
the size and influence of the
French Resistance and the
extent to which the Vichy
government collaborated
with its Nazi occupiers.
The Soviet Union is only
now acknowledging, albeit
grudgingly, that its Jewish
citizens were singled out for
slaughter.
Even Jewish
groups are using
the Holocaust for
their own
purposes.
Even in the Netherlands,
Ms. Miller maintains, there
has been widespread revi-
sionism. The Anne Frank
story has allowed the Dutch
to cling to a misleading
reputation for "moral stead-
fastness, political courage
and resistance that can only
be envied by Austrians and
others."
The reality, however, is
that the Dutch were guilty of
almost universal passivity
during the Nazi occupation.
"The overwhelming
majority of the country .. .
did not collaborate with the
Nazis, but simply obeyed
orders and went along," she
writes. As a result, of the
140,000 Jews in Holland at
the outbreak of the war, only
35,000, or 25 percent, sur-
vived. Only Poland had a
higher kill ratio, she notes.
In her visit to West Ger-
many, Ms. Miller finds that
in no other country has the
recent past been explored
with such intensity. Yet the
conclusions reached in that
process are ambiguous.
On the one hand, West
Germany has expressed full
responsibility for Nazi
crimes by paying repara-
tions to survivors, estab-
lishing close ties to Israel
and prosecuting war
criminals.
On the other hand, as
German Jewish historian
Fritz Stern tells Ms. Miller,