A Child’s View of Holocaust : Museums: An exhibit recounting the horrors of Nazi Germany through a Jewish boy’s eyes offers children a timeless lesson about hate.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

before you are six, or seven, or eight,

to hate all the people your relatives hate--

you’ve got to be carefully taught.

--Oscar Hammerstein II,

“South Pacific”

What if children are carefully taught not to hate but to understand the consequences of hate?

That’s the goal of “Remember the Children,” a nationally touring, multimedia exhibit opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History next Saturday. It is based on the lives of the 1.5 million children killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

And yes, it is for children--as young as 8 years old.

Too intense? Organizers say it isn’t a horror show, but an opportunity for understanding.

“It isn’t harsh, it isn’t full of dead bodies. It’s a gentle show,” said Addie Yates, who chairs the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s Remember the Children Committee, which organized the exhibit.

“You’re seeing the Holocaust through children’s eyes,” said Stephen Goodell, director of educational projects for the Memorial Council, who is in Los Angeles overseeing the exhibit’s installation.

“We don’t brutalize the visitor. There are no gas chambers, no corpses, no crematoria. If you see barracks, people behind barbed wire, that’s sufficient to convey what you’re trying to convey.

“And with Daniel telling you the story, it’s pretty powerful.”

“Daniel” is a fictional German Jewish boy whose composite experiences mirror what happened to so many children. In a short introductory film, Daniel tells of the changes in his life; in environmental settings, films, photo murals and interactive video, visitors experience what he went through.

Goodell says the exhibit covers events from 1933 to 1941 “which would have affected Daniel’s family’s lives: The boycott against all Jewish stores, the informal and formal laws to strip Jewish people of rights, the propaganda, the violence against them, the removal of Jewish children from German schools, forcing them to wear a star, and finally in 1941, deportation” to a Polish ghetto.

Later in the walk-through exhibit, a second film has Daniel describing being sent to Auschwitz. He and his father survive doing slave labor; his mother and sister are killed. Daniel’s story ends in 1945 with the American liberation.

Yates, wife of Memorial Council member Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), conceived the idea for an educational exhibit when her husband was appointed to the council four years ago. (The federally mandated council oversees Holocaust education and the soon-to-be-completed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.)

“The murder of a million and a half children by the Nazis used to haunt me,” Yates said. “I wondered if I could do something to remember them.”

First produced by the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington, the exhibit traveled to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and has been newly adapted to fit the Los Angeles museum space.

When the main exhibit is over, visitors are invited to take part in several “decompression” activities. A “Watch-Out Wall” offers a progression of panels showing how stereotyping and prejudice can escalate into persecution and genocide.

“Talk-Back Books” and a decorative cardboard tile project allow people to write down feelings. (Similarly painted ceramic tiles from schoolchildren will be displayed in the permanent Memorial Museum in Washington.)

On interactive screens, concentration camp survivors tell of their experiences and answer pre-programmed questions. There are also in-person talks with survivors.

Gerda Klein, author of several books about the Holocaust and active in teen suicide prevention programs, is one of the survivors videotaped for the exhibit.

“It’s not a Jewish story only,” she said from her Arizona home. “It’s a tragedy of humanity.

“I feel strongly that all children should be informed, but I don’t think they should be frightened. I was in camps for three years and I remember so many acts of kindness, people who helped each other,” Klein said. “Those things are easier to relate to than the other, the horror.”

Not overburdening children was a primary concern. Sara Bloomfield, executive director of the memorial council, initially had doubts. “My question was, what happened to keeping children innocent as long as you can?”

But after seeing youngsters’ reactions to the exhibit--and being reminded of the desensitizing real and fictional violence children are exposed to daily on TV--Bloomfield said that “my concerns were not borne out. Without being violent and graphic you can make a very strong emotional impact.

“It gives parents the opportunity to talk to their children about lots of important subjects: how they treat fellow classmates or the kids on the block, maybe a kid sister. It raises questions about human beings from a child’s point of view and helps them understand things outside of themselves.”

Bloomfield added, “While we use the Holocaust as a pivotal event of human history, I hope people will view the exhibition not as something parochial but as something with universal lessons in it.” It says a lot, she stressed, “about individual and collective responsibility.”

Yates hopes visitors come away with a message of tolerance for other people “regardless of color, religion or creed. At the end, you hope for hope, love and understanding. It’s not a small order,” she acknowledged.