Close Up
Out of the Silence
also more than 200 Holocaust resource
and education centers around the coun-
try.
Plus, every state — and hundreds of
towns and cities — now have annual
commemorations for the Holocaust. And
on college campuses, the Holocaust is the
second most widely taught course of Jew-
ish content.
The "conspiracy of silence" that origi-
nally muted the Holocaust eroded slow-
ly. First with the 1961 trial of Adolf
Eichmann, then with the 1967 Six-Day
War, and finally — and permanently —
in 1978 with, of all things, a TV mini-se-
ries about the Nazi slaughters.
By 1988, the Holocaust had moved
from the unspeakable to the unavoid-
able. When an American Jewish Com-
mittee survey asked U.S. Jews which
meant more to them — the Exodus and
Torah or the Holocaust and Israel — only
14 percent said the first two. Sixty-nine
percent chose the Holocaust and Israel,
symbols to many of death and terror —
and hope and resurrection.
No one knows how the new museum
in Washington will alter this calculus.
Or how it might change American gen-
tiles' views of Jews. Or Jews' views of
themselves. But if nothing else, the mu-
seum will convey the enormity and the
vast complexity of the Holocaust — and
the moral tremors with which it shook
the world. It will bring Americans face
to face with the horror of 50 years ago —
and, implicitly, with the horror that con-
tinues today as Bosnia is "ethnically
cleansed" and children starve in Soma-
lia.
And it will embody a hope that such
disgraces need not be. In the words of
Eva Pickova, a Czech Jew:
Martyrs, Not Suffering
As much as Washington's museum is
a monument to the Holocaust, it is also
a statement that the Holocaust of today
is not the same as the Holocaust of a half-
century ago. The fact that it exists con-
firms that Americans' — and American
Jews' — attitude toward the Nazi mur-
ders is wholly different than what it was
a few decades ago.
When the guns in Europe finally stilled
in 1945, hundreds of thousands of sur-
vivors filled refugee camps in Europe. By
the early 1950s, about a quarter-million
had gone to Israel and almost 100,000 to
America. Although the Jewish commu-
My heart still beats inside my breast nities that awaited them were -striking-
While friends depart for other worlds. ly dissimilar, in both they encountered
Perhaps it's better — who can say? — the same phenomenon: Silence. (See box,
Than watching this, to die today?
page 40, for Israeli reaction to survivors.)
"You have a terrific imagination," a
No, no, my God, we want to live!
Brooklyn Jew told her neighbor — a sur-
Not watch our numbers melt away.
vivor — when hearing about her experi-
We want to have a better world...
ences. "You should write stories."
In New Orleans, an Army veteran told
Eva Pickova died in Auschwitz.
a
survivor,
"Don't try to tell people what
She was 12 years old.
Museum Facts
* The museum is between 14th and 15th Streets, S.W., just
south of Independence Avenue and 400 yards from the
Washington Monument. Information: 202-488-0400.
* Hours: 10-a.m.-5:30 p.m., seven days a week.
* The museum is free, but until Labor Day, visitors will need
timed tickets to enter it. Tickets can be reserved through
Ticketmaster (800-551-7328) or be picked up at the museum
each morning.
* The federal government contributed 1.9 acres for the
museum.
* Construction began in July, 1989. The architect is James
Ingo Freed of I.M. Pei and Partners.
* The museum acquired more than 25,000 artifacts. About
5,000 will be in its permanent exhibit.
* Major artifacts include wooden barracks from Birkenau,
cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto, 2,000 pairs of shoes
from Auschwitz, a railroad car that transported Jews to
Treblinka, and a life-size casting from the main gate at
Auschwitz, with the legend, Arbeit Macht Frei —"Work Shall
Set You Free."
* The three-floor, 36,000-square-foot permanent exhibit is
recommended for children 11 and up. A separate children's
exhibit that follows the life of a composite youth who survived
the Holocaust is for children 8 and up.
* Particularly graphic or disturbing material in the
permanent exhibit is located behind "privacy walls" to give
visitors — especially children — an opportunity to avoid
viewing them.
* A theater in the museum will show excerpts from more
than 200 interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust.
* Twenty-four computer terminals at the museum's Wexner
Learning Center will let visitors call up articles about
Holocaust-related topics, watch interviews with Holocaust
survivors, see maps or photos, and listen to Holocaust-related
music.
* Visitors will receive a card with a photo and description of a
person of the same sex and roughly the same age who
experienced the Holocaust. At various points in the exhibit
area, they can insert the card into a computer to discover that
person's fate.
* More than 200,000 donors contributed over $150 million.
Sixty-two donors gave at least $1 million, including the Coca-
Cola Company (which gave $1 million to commemorate 25
years of doing business in Israel), and the Helena Rubenstein
Foundation (which gave $3 million for a theater in the
museum).
— A.J.M.
happened in Europe... I walked into those
camps and I saw all the things the Ger-
mans did and people here don't believe
it when you tell them."
The veteran had learned to only speak
about the camps with people who had
been there.
The few books published in the U.S.
in the late 1940s about the Holocaust
dwelled on Jews' resistance, not their suf-
fering. And the one book that did capture
Americans' imagination in the 1950s —
The Diary of Anne Frank — was, in a
sense, not about the Holocaust. It did not
speak about the hell into which the Jews
had plunged because it could not: All
Anne knew was that bad things were
happening to Jews somewhere beyond
her attic.
Instead, she wrote with innocence and
optimism. "This was Anne before she
went to Auschwitz," said Michael Beren-
baum, the Washington museum's proj-
ect director. "Her diary says, above all,
`above all, I believe in man.' That was her
world before there was despair."
As the Dutch teen-ager's diary was
selling in the millions, more than half a
dozen American publishers rejected Elie
Wiesel's first book about the Holocaust,
Night, and about 10 rejected Raul
Hilberg's now-classic account of German
bureaucratic efficiency, The Destruction
of the European Jews, which he had be-
gun researching in 1948. When it was fi-
nally published in 1961, it was largely
ignored by the Jewish establishment.
"The message from Jerusalem and
Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memo-
rial and research center] was that you
could only talk about martyrdom and re-
sistance," Professor Hilberg said recently.
As late as 1957, the Holocaust had
made such a minor dent on American
Jews that Harvard sociologist Nathan
Glazer said the "two greatest events in
modern Jewish life" — the Holocaust and
the creation of Israel — "have had re-
markably slight effects on the inner life
of American Jewry."
And nine years later, when Commen-
taly magazine conducted a symposium
on "the condition of Jewish belief," the
Holocaust was not mentioned in the five
long questions editors sent to partici-
c=\