Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 26, 1993 TAG: 9304250012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HENRY ALLEN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Well, there's Anne Frank. And, if you're Jewish, there's a grandmother at Treblinka, a cousin at Auschwitz, and all the faces touched by forefingers in photo albums . . . that was your mother's great-uncle George, he won medals for swimming and later he owned a factory that made mother-of-pearl brushes.
After that, nothing but a number - the Six Million. As Stalin is said to have said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
The statistic - what does it mean? - is the companion of the images buried in your nervous system like herpes viruses: the barbed wire, the overcoats and soup bowls, the innocence of starvation eyes, trains, gas, children, experiments, smokestacks, the pornography of Nazi evil-swagger sticks, dogs, Hitler's frantic radio voice, torches - and then the Allies' bulldozers pushing slow piles of bodies into pits.
Whatever it means, this is our Holocaust, the memorial inside our heads. We've built it from television, books, movies, trials and college courses.
Now we have the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opens today, just off Independence Avenue.
Why? Why put the Holocaust next to the Mall with its merry-go-round, moon rocks and other triumphs of the human spirit? If we want to commemorate a disaster, why not a museum of slavery or the slaughter in Cambodia?
"Fine," says Michael Berenbaum, head of the museum's research center. "Let's have them."
And, the argument goes, many slaves died indeed, but their owners wanted them alive, not dead. Unlike the million or so Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, the Jews were not being killed for their politics, intellect or even religion, but for their race.
Why a museum dedicated almost entirely to the Jews who died in the Holocaust? The answer runs along the lines of: The Nazis slaughtered Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, the insane and the enfeebled too, but not with the earnestness they brought to the Jews. The scope, intention and logic of the Jewish Holocaust make it unique.
Why have a memorial to a European genocide in the capital of the United States of America?
"I myself am not happy about having a building on the Mall. I belong to a generation that says a building cannot express this idea," says literary critic Alfred Kazin. "I don't think the Holocaust is part of American culture."
John Roth, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, says the museum belongs here. "Auschwitz and Treblinka - those death camps shadow American ground. They warn us never to take the Dream for granted."
More reasoning:
If we have museums of art from Asia, Africa and Europe, there's no reason to ban this museum because the Holocaust happened on another continent.
The museum illustrates American values by displaying their opposite.
The Holocaust is a moral absolute worth commemorating in an age of moral relativity.
The Holocaust gets used to denote an endless list of evils - the slaughter of the Ibos, AIDS, abortion and animal experimentation. Shouldn't we try to keep opportunists from misusing it?
On and on and on.
The Holocaust has been "corrupted by sentimentality, emotionalism and bathos," writes scholar Jacob Neusner.
"Now it's getting invoked when we're talking about Bosnia," says Peter Novick, a historian at the University of Chicago. "We're supposed to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. This is especially dopey. What is the lesson? That killing 6 million men, women and children is wrong? We knew that! What the hell are these lessons?"
It doesn't matter. The fact is, the Holocaust Museum is here, a national monument. But what does it mean?
It is a brick and limestone building that reminds you of the factory on the edge of town when you were growing up, an industrial smugness about it. It has metal doors with big bolts in the frames. It has smokestacks, towers and blind niches. It has a lonely row of metal-shrouded security lights jutting from the wall. It overwhelms you with a sort of grim seniority, like a prison or like a railroad station in a bad memory. It looks like an old photograph of itself. Its indifference is crushing.
Inside, you feel as though you're being processed through the exhibit rather than strolling through it. A staircase narrows as it rises. Catwalks over the Hall of Witnesses provoke a Piranesian paranoia. You sense how industrial engineering and 20th century social engineering are the same thing, the same belief in rationality's ability to solve problems.
You take a small, grim elevator to the fourth floor, and descend through the permanent exhibit. In keeping with the latest museum technology, there are video screens everywhere, enough to prompt the feeling you get from the TV walls in electronics stores - as if you're being stared at by blind people, an unsettling blend of reality and unreality. Nazis salute Hitler with beefy tiptoe eagerness. They smash the windows of Jewish stores. And all the photographs: book-burning gleefulness, and an SS officer by the railroad tracks in Auschwitz, ordering people to the right or left, to death now or death later. As Tadeusz Borowski put it in the title of his Auschwitz memoir: "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen."
Holocaust photographs are nothing new. They hardly seem real anymore. But the sense of reality tingles quite vividly at the sight of the Hollerith machine. There, glowering with the bustling potential you remember from old sewing machines, is the IBM computer that sorted lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life, into stacks of punch cards.
As you descend from floor to floor, things get even more real: a boxcar that hauled people to Treblinka - it smells like a bureau drawer in a summer house. A pile of shoes. The ovens. Then the newsreels of the liberation. The bulldozers. The eyes.
Carved into a museum wall is the testimony of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
"The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there developed a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda."
How strange. Who could forget something as real as the Holocaust?
Everybody could forget.
Or at least a lot of people didn't want to remember, or know.
Simon Wiesenthal remembers SS troopers telling the prisoners:
"There will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: They will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you."
Who would believe the testimony of Jews whom an American liberator, Gen. George Patton, described as "a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time"? He also said no ordinary people "could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years."
Imagine thinking of four years in Dachau as "short."
Then again, who could imagine the reality of the Holocaust? From the beginning it has been a rumor, an incredible newspaper story, an idea, an impossibility, an invocation. Starting before World War II, newspapers were burying stories about it, if they ran them at all. Governments found it convenient to ignore what reports there were. Military strategists found it incidental to the main business of the war.
Toward the end of the war, the word "genocide" had to be invented to describe it. The word "holocaust" didn't enter general use until the 1960s - it started the decade as a common noun, and ended it capitalized. As if the words really mattered. Elie Wiesel has said: "The Holocaust in its enormity defies language and art, and yet both must be used to tell the tale, the tale that must be told."
What is the Holocaust in the American mind?
It's Nazis striding around with riding crops. It's a plea for sympathy, or a demand for respect. It's guard towers, "Sophie's Choice," the horrible ee-oo sirens of Gestapo Mercedeses and the old grandpa down the block who stayed in his room reading so you never got to see the number tattooed on his arm. It is Elie Wiesel's "Night." It was a technological inevitability, a moral probability, a freak of human nature. It's the bogeyman, a ghost, a historical event that someday will fade in students' minds like the Council of Trent or the Hanseatic League.
Recently, for instance, a Roper poll for the American Jewish Committee was released, showing that 53 percent of high school students and 38 percent of adults were unable to correctly define the word "Holocaust." A fifth said it was possible it never happened at all.
by CNB