Curtain Rises on a Museum of Bitter Lessons

In a cold rain that fell from leaden skies, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated Thursday at a ceremony where the chants of neo-Nazi protesters served as a reminder that the present is not yet purged of all the hatreds of the past.

“This museum is not for the dead alone, nor even for the survivors,” President Clinton told the assembled crowd of 7,000 dignitaries, concentration camp survivors and relatives of other Holocaust victims huddled under a sea of swaying umbrellas at the edge of the Washington Mall. “It is, most of all, for those of us who were not there, to learn the lessons . . . and transmit them from generation to generation.”

Clinton said the Holocaust, which 50 years ago set the standard of evil by which all other acts of inhumanity would be judged, taught the world there is “no ‘war to end all wars’ and that the struggle against the basest tendencies of our nature must continue forever.”

With the end of the Cold War, he added, “we must not only rejoice in so much that is good in the world but recognize that not all in this new world is good.”

Presidents, prime ministers and cabinet officials from more than 18 nations joined with survivors and relatives to commemorate the opening of the controversial $168-million memorial to the millions of victims of Nazi Germany’s coldly methodical attempt to eradicate the Jewish people.

Built with private contributions on government-donated land, the memorial, designed by architect James Ingo Freed, stands in stark contrast to the gleaming white monuments to past American presidents that flank it. Coldly neoclassical on the outside and forbiddingly dark and indifferent on the inside, the five-story prison-like structure is meant to jar the senses, to evoke a sense of despair amid the memorials to freedom that surround it.

While the architecture has been praised, some have questioned the appropriateness of a monument to an event that happened in Europe, built in an area normally reserved to commemorate events in American history.

But Clinton said that it was grimly appropriate to locate the museum within a stone’s throw of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials “and so bind one of the darkest lessons in history to the hopeful soul of America.” He urged “everyone who comes to Washington” to visit “this museum, which will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed.”

While Clinton was the keynote speaker at the dedication ceremonies, it was not up to the first American president to be born after World War II to evoke the despair and bitterness appropriate to the day.

That task fell to another speaker who preceded Clinton to the podium, his voice rising in pitch as he asked the question that has obviously tormented him for 50 years.

“Why?” asked author Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and concentration camp survivor. Why, he asked, were the railway lines that transported Jews in cattle cars to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and the other death camps not bombed by the Allies, whose leaders knew their purpose? Why, he asked, was more not done to help the Jewish Resistance in Poland and other places where it made heroic but hopeless stands against the Nazis?

Why, he asked finally in anguish, “was man’s silence matched by God’s” during that long “kingdom of the night” in which 6 million Jews, nearly a third of them children, disappeared down the “black hole of history?”

“There are no answers,” Wiesel concluded softly. “This museum is not an answer. It is a question mark.”

His fist clenched in anger, Wiesel then turned to Clinton and apologized for what he said he must say next. He had been to Bosnia last fall, he said, and had been troubled in his sleep every night since the visit. “Mr. President, we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. . . . Something, anything, must be done.”

Clinton, when he rose to speak a short while later, did not directly respond to Wiesel’s challenge. But he denounced Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia as the “most brutal and blatant” example of the violence being committed by “the depraved and insensate bands now loose in the modern world.”

He also cited Iraqi violence against its Kurdish minority, Iranian oppression of the Bahai minority and the “endless race-based violence of South Africa” as examples of how “we are reminded again and again of how fragile are the safeguards of civilization.”

Barely two blocks away as he spoke, several dozen skinheads and other demonstrators waved placards and chanted slogans proclaiming that the Holocaust never occurred.

“It is all a hoax perpetrated by Jews to get money for Israel,” asserted Daniel DeMarco, a self-proclaimed Nazi sympathizer from Pittsburgh, Pa. “There were no ovens, no extermination camps, and only a few Jews died and it wasn’t deliberate. They were needed for labor.”

A row of mounted police separated the demonstrators from the spectators, who shook their heads or shot the protesters furtive glances while filing into the plaza.

The museum, which opens to the public Monday, is like no other tourist attraction in the nation’s capital, and officials advise adults to exercise discretion in taking children through it. Small children, in fact, are prevented from seeing some of the more grisly exhibits, which are behind walls tall enough only for an adult to look over.

The first thing that strikes a visitor is that the building itself, from the bleak corridor lighting to the elevators with their oven-like steel doors, are integral parts of the exhibit.

The grim brick walls are laced with steel bands, also like the ovens. Watchtowers loom above the central atrium like guard posts. The stairways are narrow like the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz and the axis of the roof is askew like a world gone awry.

It is meant to be oppressive and imprisoning, a feeling reinforced by the identity cards each visitor is given upon entering. The cards correspond to the gender and age of each visitor, who is asked to assume the identity of the Holocaust victim described on the card for the duration of the visit.

Beginning on the fourth floor and descending story by story, the exhibits chronicle with vivid photographs, films and artifacts the rise of Adolf Hitler, the persecution of the Jews and other Nazi victims--such as Gypsies and homosexuals--and life and death in the concentration camps, ending finally with the survivors’ liberation by the Allies.

In the museum, one horror follows another. There is a railway car from a death train on display and the mock-up of the crematorium at Auschwitz. There also is the frame-by-frame agony of the victim of a Nazi medical experiment, whose death throes were methodically photographed by Nazi doctors.