Holocaust Center About More Than Just Counting the Victims

c. 2005 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ Within days of December’s tsunami tragedy, in which at least 200,000 people perished, it became clear that the bodies of tens of thousands of the victims would never be recovered. Entire villages were wiped out and with them the records of the people who lived there. In the […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Within days of December’s tsunami tragedy, in which at least 200,000 people perished, it became clear that the bodies of tens of thousands of the victims would never be recovered. Entire villages were wiped out and with them the records of the people who lived there. In the places where no one survived, there was no one left to recall the names of the dead, no one to mourn them.

While the notion that a whole community could be swallowed without a trace seems inconceivable, it is not without precedent. During the Holocaust the Nazis and their collaborators wiped out entire Jewish communities, one after the other.


In many instances, they deported all the villagers to death camps or gathered them in the local synagogue and set fire to it, burning them alive. They herded Jews into the forest, forced them to dig their own graves, then shot them or buried them alive. Often, entire families were wiped out, leaving no one to remember the dead and to say kaddish, the mourning prayer.

It is no wonder, then, that Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust center, has been able to collect the names of only half the 6 million Jews known to have been murdered during this period. Holocaust deniers like to use this fact to minimize the massacre or to attempt to disprove it entirely.

In reality, the remaining 3 million victims did exist, just as the tsunami victims existed. They attended school, fell in love, got married, had children. Even when stuck in wretched ghettos or concentration camps where food and sanitation were almost nonexistent, they managed to live their lives with dignity. They wrote moving letters and diary entries, painted and drew their surroundings, and even organized small choirs and orchestras.

They sought life even when death hovered all around them.

Yad Vashem’s new history museum, which opened in March, reflects this vibrancy.

Unlike the aging museum it replaced, which conveyed the enormity of the Holocaust, the new facility focuses on the 6 million individuals whose lives were snuffed out.

During a tour of the museum, Yehudit Shendar, a senior art curator, said that it is “easy to get lost in the numbers and the facts. We wanted to find a way to make the Shoah personal.”

Toward this end the curators have included numerous artifacts, both ordinary and extraordinary, that once belonged to Holocaust victims and their persecutors.

Contemporary artwork by Holocaust victims is placed in many of the exhibits “because art becomes part of the historical narrative,” Shendar said. “You can’t get a Jewish perspective of anti-Semitism from a photograph or documents by the perpetrators.”


The exhibitions related to the rise of Nazism and long-standing anti-Semitism include some chilling items: a typewriter with keys that type a swastika, a children’s board game called “Out With the Jews,” and a shoe inner sole cut from a Torah scroll.

Numerous family photos, some salvaged from the worn pockets of the dead, remind the visitor that every person who was murdered had a family and a name. One memorable photo shows a smiling bride and groom with the yellow Jewish stars they were forced to wear attached to their wedding attire.

Paintings by Jewish artists caught in the Nazis’ web depict life as they saw it. Some show long lines of desperate Jews waiting hopefully for visas to other countries; others depict Jews being rounded up by the Nazis.

There are real Zyklon B canisters that once held poison gas and a wooden concentration camp barrack where victims lay starving and freezing. A door borrowed from the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau evokes images too horrific to contemplate.

Near the end of the tour, Shendar asked visitors whether they had ever heard of the Belzec death camp. They hadn’t. “Few people have,” she said, “because no one survived it.” Four or five hours after arriving people were stripped of everything, including their gold teeth. Things hidden by people in their private parts were taken. Naked, they were put into the gas chambers.

At the end of the museum stands the new Hall of Names, whose 30-foot-high domed ceiling contains 600 victims’ photos.


These portraits are reflected in a pool of water held in a deep cistern. Along the hall’s circular walls are 3 million pages of handwritten testimonies _ one for each Holocaust victim fortunate enough to have someone to remember him or her by name.

One such person was David Berger, an electrician born in 1919. Trapped in Vilna in the late 1930s, he wrote letters to his girfriend, a woman named Elsa.

Elsa survived and kept the letters hidden in a wooden box for 50 years. When she died, her daughter discovered the letters and brought them to Yad Vashem.

In his final postcard, dated 1941, the young man sensed that his death was near.

“I should like someone to remember there once lived a person named David Berger,” he concluded.

David Berger was one of the millions of innocents swept away in the Nazis’ tsunami of hatred.


A tsunami that, unlike the one that recently devastated entire communities in Asia, was totally preventable.

MO/PH RNS END

(Michele Chabin, a veteran journalist, reports for Religion News Service from Jerusalem.)

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!