Not Just a History Lesson on the Holocaust : Understanding: Museum of Tolerance uses personal testimonies along with computers in $5-million Multimedia Learning Center.

Robert Clary, actor and Holocaust survivor, was trying to describe the unspeakable to a roomful of 13-year-olds from a middle school in Pacoima.

Clary, a small, handsome man, began by telling them that he had been lucky when the Nazis captured him, lucky in that he was not their age but a few years older.

“At 13 you were not allowed to live,” he explained. Clary, who was 16 when he was rounded up in his native Paris, was made a slave laborer. Ten other members of his immediate family were promptly put to death. After his imprisonment, Clary went on to become an entertainer, best known for his role as Le Beau, one of the absurdly happy prisoners of war in the TV show, “Hogan’s Heroes.”

For more than a decade, Clary has told his story, that of the remnant of European Jews who survived the Nazi genocide that took 6 million Jewish lives. It was not until the early 1980s, he told the schoolchildren who sat in a small auditorium at the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles on Tuesday, that he decided to tell his tale. The reason, he said, was his realization that anti-Semitism was still alive, still causing Jewish cemeteries to be vandalized and temples to be desecrated.

Michael Taylor, the children’s teacher, is not sure how much the children took home from Clary’s lesson. Racism is a fact of life at their school, Taylor said, although it usually involves tension between African Americans and Latinos. The real minorities in the class, he said, are a Cambodian girl and a couple of white students who are often the butt of cruel jokes.

Taylor could not be sure how deeply the students were touched by Clary’s painfully vivid account of how his parents must have died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, how they were stripped and shaved in the moments before their deaths, how they must have suffered in the long 10 minutes before the murderous gas finally did its work.

“I try to put them in my shoes,” Clary said later. He had told the youngsters how it had felt to be crammed into a cattle car, how exhausted he had been, working 12 hours a day in various labor and concentration camps and surviving on nothing but a daily bit of margarine, a piece of bread and a bowl of soup that was nothing but water.

And he had described the scene he must have imagined a million times when he finally learned what had happened to his parents, how they had died in a room where they thought they were going to be given a shower, screaming perhaps, with children being trampled underfoot by people maddened by fear. “That’s how they died, my parents, and just because they were Jewish.”

The Museum of Tolerance had taken the occasion of the 52nd anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to call a press conference. The museum wanted to draw attention to its $5-million Multimedia Learning Center, 30 interactive multimedia stations that allow individuals to wend their own way through the horrors of World War II and the Nazi reign of terror. Other prerecorded testimony by Clary is among the bits of information people can access when they sit at one of the computer stations, earphones on their heads.

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The center’s database includes 5,000 text entries from such sources as the Encyclopedia Judaica ; 53,000 still photos and documents; 4,000 maps. The system also contains 14 hours of videotape, including the testimony of a Los Angeles woman who survived after spending 24 hours in an Auschwitz gas chamber that had malfunctioned.

During their visit, the Pacoima schoolchildren also heard Clarence Matsumura, another victim of intolerance. Matsumura was a Japanese American living in Los Angeles when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was one of 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were sent to internment camps throughout the West.

The food was awful in the camps, he recalled. Someone in charge decided that people of Japanese descent liked fish, so squid was on the menu three times a day. Despite the way he was treated, Matsumura enlisted in the Army. In the spring of 1945, his unit, the 522nd Field Artillery of the 442nd Regimental Combat Unit, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Matsumura said that the hour at which his unit stumbled on the concentration camp near Munich was as unnaturally still as the time just before an earthquake. “No birds sang,” he recalled. And he told the teen-agers he did not believe that the Germans who lived in the area did not know what was happening there. The stench of burning flesh was unmistakable, he said.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, project director for the Multimedia Learning Center, said he has no fears that the high-tech facility will trivialize the Holocaust, turning it into some kind of grotesque video game. The entire museum, he said, is committed to finding ways to engage the hearts and minds of visitors and to teach them the value of tolerance. What better way than this to involve youngsters who were practically born with a joystick in their hands?

Once the youngsters are engaged, they can dig as deeply as they want into the vast resources of the museum, which include such unique materials as original letters by Anne Frank. “The system itself has a depth that makes sure that no one will walk away from here saying it’s just a game,” Cooper said.