ART / Allan Jalon : Entrepreneur Drops Concentration Camp From Wax Museum

Remember Allen Parkinson, the Orange County entrepreneur who wants to give a personal twist to philosopher George Santayana’s famous quote about people who forget history?

Santayana said people who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Parkinson is a man who remembers it and wanted to re-create it in wax and charge money. He had planned to build a Nazi concentration camp as part of a historical wax museum in Santa Ana. The museum is still going up. The concentration camp isn’t.

Parkinson said last week that he has decided to drop that controversial part of the project--21 wax figures set in a concentration camp scene with a moan-filled sound track--after a meeting requested by Orange County Jewish leaders.

Parkinson met last month at the Irvine office of the American Jewish Committee with Hinda Beral, the group’s Orange County director; Merv Lemmerman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, and Chelle Friedman, director of the federation’s community relations committee.

Meanwhile, Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said he is planning to meet with Parkinson in the near future to express his concern about other aspects of the museum Parkinson hopes to open in June.

“He was very open to listening to things that we had to say and to understanding our concern about his using Holocaust scenes as entertainment,” Friedman said. “He had evidently heard from lots of people expressing a variety of concerns.”

Said Beral: “It was a very cordial meeting. He came in and said he was going to take the Holocaust section out because he understood there was concern in the Jewish community and he didn’t want to offend the community in any way.

“Other Holocaust museums, certainly, are not for profit,” Beral added. “There’s a great deal of dignity and solemnity to memorials. . . . For there to be an entertainment aspect to it is very much desecration. I think he thought he was doing a positive thing.”

Parkinson still does. “I was very surprised to find out that there was any objection to the concentration camp,” he said. “But I’m not going to put it in if the Jewish people don’t want it. . . . Look, having the concentration camp was not going to build business. I don’t do everything for money. Things I do make money. There’s a difference. I wanted to tell people the complete story (of World War II).”

To tell that story, Parkinson, 65, will still include wax figures of Nazi leaders. He said he is not trying to glorify the Nazis but to remind people of their role as forgers of a horrific era. The museum will also include a scene showing the signing of the American Bill of Rights and scenes from Mexican history.

Friedman said she still worries about the historical accuracy of narrations Parkinson plans to include in the World War II section.

“I, personally, have a concern about what he ends up with unless he has an unusually sensitive historian writing these scripts,” she said.

Parkinson plans to hire a historian but said he has no one in mind. “This is going to be the history,” he insisted. “The complete, factual history. . . . When this is done, without the concentration camp, Jewish people are going to want to see it.”

Parkinson said he is not angry about newspaper articles quoting critics of the museum who were upset about the commercialization of Jewish suffering in World War II.

“There’s no profit in getting mad,” he said.

Another episode involving propriety and public display continues to unfold at Chapman College. Student Joel Moffett wrote a performance art piece called “The Coloring Box” that is about people breaking free of societal pressures to conform. To symbolize their naked rebirth, free and independent, Moffett planned to have two of his characters appear nude for a five-minute scene.

That, decided officials at the private, religiously affiliated college, was not appropriate. They banned the scene from the production, scheduled May 18-20. They also made it clear that nudity will not be acceptable in future student productions.

All this has Moffett and his supporters in an uproar about his loss of artistic independence. “My aim is to express myself as an artist,” he said.

What is getting lost in all this is the naivete of Moffett’s scene. The episode may, in fact, be the best bit of education he gets at Chapman College. People are rarely stripped of societal pressure, rarely naked in that sense, and what seems like social nakedness often isn’t.

Consider the following anecdote about the great German Expressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach, a deeply spiritual, physically imposing, highly independent man with a talent for capturing universal qualities of human character in wooden figures. They are always completely, thickly clothed.

A journalist once approached Barlach and asked why he never sculpted his subjects naked. According to the story, he broke out in laughter, then said: “Come now, do you really think that just because someone isn’t wearing clothes, they’re naked?”