HOLOCAUST MUSEUM TEACHES LOVE, NOT HATE
MARCELLA S. KREITER
United Press International
April 17 2009
SKOKIE, Ill., April 17 (UPI) — To Warsaw Ghetto survivor Barbara
Steiner, the newest U.S. Holocaust museum is more a museum of love
than a chronicle of World War II inhumanity.
"If we stop hating and start to love … it doesn’t make any difference
what religion you are or what color you are," Steiner said Friday,
two days in advance of the official opening of the Illinois Holocaust
Museum & Education Center in Skokie, Ill.
The museum, the last expected to be built with the help of Holocaust
survivors, is an outgrowth of the 1977 Nazi march in Skokie, which
galvanized the Chicago suburb’s Jewish population, many of whom were
Holocaust survivors, to put together a program to educate people
about what happened. Some 12 million people died in Nazi death camps,
half of them Jews.
The $45 million facility boasts a 10,000-volume research library, links
to the Shoah Project and access to tapes made by survivors living in
the Midwest, and a replica of one of the cattle cars used to transport
Jews to the Nazi gas chambers, as well as a mock deportation center
and camp enclosure. For those too young to tour the main exhibit,
there is an educational center on the lower level where children 8
to 11 years of age can explore issues such as dealing with bullies.
The purpose is to "teach people to love instead of hate," said Steiner,
who helped blow up one of the first tanks to enter the Warsaw Ghetto
as resistance mounted.
"We fought longer than France, longer than Belgium, longer than
Poland. We swore they would never take is alive."
Steiner hid in a bunker she had dug herself and was only forced
into the open after the Nazis burned the remaining structures in the
ghetto. From there, she and fellow survivors were herded into cattle
cars and taken to Mydanek in Lublin, Poland.
Though the project was inspired by the Jewish community, the museum
explores other examples of genocide, including Rwanda, Darfur
and Armenia. In the artwork section on the top floor, there is a
disturbing piece showing the backs of picture frames, representing the
"disappeared" of South America.
The industrial-looking, 65,000-square-foot building was designed by
Stanley Tigerman.
"It was done that way on purpose to convey the industrialization of
mass murder," Executive Director Richard S. Hirschhaut said.
Entering the main exhibit, visitors enter a darkened area representing
what museum officials describe as a "descent into darkness." In the
facility’s Hall of Remembrance, the names of numerous Nazi victims
are inscribed on a rounded ceiling.
"I come in here and I see the name of my little sister, Sarah,"
said Aaron Elster, who spent the war hiding in the attic of a Polish
couple. "She was 6 years old.
"My father told me to run when the Nazis came to round us up. I
was 10. I lived in barns and fields and then went to this Polish
couple. My parents knew them. For two years I did not go outside,
or change clothes or take a bath."
Elster’s father and sister died in the Treblinka death camp.
Sunday’s scheduled opening coincides with the anniversary of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Nobel laureate
and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel are among those expected to attend.