Destination: Washington, D.C., Los Angeles : Viewing the Unthinkable : Documenting the Horrors of the Holocaust Is Sensitive Business, and Two Museums Attempt It With Different Degrees of Success

It has come to this. The Holocaust, an event horrific enough to beggar imagination, has become a tourist attraction. A big-time tourist attraction.

According to James E. Young, author of “The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning,” more than 100 museums worldwide focus on the event (not to mention the existence of literally thousands of monuments and memorials) and newspapers report that Holocaust museum-less cities such as Berlin are publicly pressing to join the club. Every year, Young estimates, as many people visit these sites as perished in the original cataclysm.

In this country, Hollywood has rediscovered the Holocaust, with Steven Spielberg, the industry’s most powerful director, bringing out a version of Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s List” on Wednesday. And there is a flourishing Holocaust-oriented museum on both coasts, each with a very different approach to the subject. Here in Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance shies away from even calling itself a Holocaust museum, but still received glowing reviews upon opening, with everyone from Time magazine (“extraordinary”) to MTV (“very moving”) joining in the praise.

And in Washington, D.C., the home of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the success has been even more pronounced. In its first seven months of operation, the museum drew 750,000 visitors, with but little more than a third identifying themselves as Jews, outpacing pre-opening estimates by 50%. Tickets are free but so hard to come by that those who haven’t secured them weeks in advance line up early in the morning like committed rock fans in order to get in. In fact, the crowds have become so thick that the museum’s director recently took the unprecedented step of holding a press conference asking potential visitors to delay their trip because “our staff is wearing down and the building is wearing out.”

As someone whose father lost his entire family--parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone--in the camps, this explosion of attractions based on a personal sorrow made me feel rather queasy as I prepared for a pilgrimage to both of these museums.

On the one hand, at a time when Holocaust deniers appear to be gaining respectability, it is hard to argue with the need for the widest possible dissemination of knowledge. But there is always the danger of overdoing things, and over-focusing on the Holocaust can have dangers of its own, not the least of which is the institutionalization of Jews as victims and the ignoring of the thousand years of pre-Holocaust European Jewish history.

Also, this proliferation of competing museums has led to an unseemly and invidious competition for funds, with places like Yad Vashem, the venerable Israeli museum, complaining in a pitch letter that the money available to it “is but a fraction of what some other American Holocaust museums have at their disposal.”

And, echoing the epigram of Austrian writer Robert Musil, who said that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” overexposure can make horror too familiar and less chilling. Was I ready, I wondered, for the possible existence of a souvenir item reading, “My folks went to the Holocaust Museum and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”?

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The first sight of the Washington museum’s building relieved a lot of my anxieties. Located just south of the Mall and west of 14th Street, it is fortress-like but not forbidding, simultaneously somber and engaging. Designed by architect James Ingo Freed, who admitted that during the process “my wife got so depressed she moved out of the bedroom,” its use of towers and turrets consciously evokes the feeling of a concentration camp. And its location next to the prison-like Bureau of Engraving and Printing, with steel fencing on the roof and shuttered windows blind to the street, only adds to the feeling that the Waffen SS is going to appear any minute.

Inside, the museum’s main hall echoes that effect, its catwalks a reminder of ghetto footbridges Jews were forced to use so they wouldn’t contaminate Aryan streets. And for visitors who arrive early, or who simply want to sample the museum without taking the full tour, both the bookstore (which thankfully does not sell T-shirts) and a pair of exhibits on the lower floors are available without an admission ticket.

The museum’s permanent exhibits, spread over 36,000 square feet of space on three floors, are arranged in what a museum guard, in a curious choice of phrase, described to my wife and me as “a lock-step pattern.” Visitors all start at the fourth floor, devoted to “Nazi Assault--1933 to 1939,” and are funneled through narrow corridors with displays on both sides down to the third floor (“Final Solution--1940 to 1944”) and finally the second (“Aftermath--1945 to Present”).

While all this may sound rigid, it makes perfect and necessary sense as you walk slowly through, following this awful story--for it is a story, with a beginning, middle and end--to its conclusion. Crammed with some 23,000 artifacts, dozens of video monitors showing vintage newsreels and numerous and formidable text panels, this museum is as dense with information as an institution can be and still function effectively. Even what feels like a rushed trip can take three hours, and many people spend upward of five.

Far from being crammed together haphazardly, everything about the place has the reassuring feel of an exhibition that has been assembled with extreme care. This attentiveness to detail is visible in the placing of the museum’s cafe in a separate building, in how the worst of the atrocity footage is placed behind four-foot-high barriers (so that no one comes upon it unawares) and even in the powerful way everyone begins the tour.

As industrial gray museum elevators take visitors to the fourth floor, the crackling voice of an American Army patrol leader radioing in over a walkie-talkie is heard. “We have come across something, we have no idea what it is,” he says, the disbelief evident in his voice. “You can’t imagine. Things like this don’t happen.”

The elevator doors open and three things are visible simultaneously. A huge blowup of a photo of American soldiers inspecting a pile of charred corpses, a monitor showing director George Stevens’ rare 16-millimeter footage, the only color film ever shot in the camps, and the word HOLOCAUST in enormous letters. Before the story starts, this museum wants to insure there be no mistake or misunderstanding about where it will end.

This desire to show and tell, to bear witness, is one of the museum’s core philosophical forces. And it is stronger here than in most museums because it has been a compulsion both of the survivors and of the liberators since the events themselves took place.

To help insure that the world would know, anyone who could saved (often at the risk of their lives) artifacts from that place and time, their desperation perhaps fueled by a premonition that no one would believe events this horrible without physical proof. And it is these artifacts--everything from the brutally defaced Torah ark from Germany’s infamous 1938 Crystal Night riots, to a rusty milk can where the Warsaw Ghetto defenders hid their archives, to children’s toys clandestinely made in the Thieresenstadt camp--that give the museum much of its power.

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Though the top floor, which displays nominally scientific instruments used to measure racial differences, and the last floor, with its small fishing boat used by Danes in their nationwide Jewish rescue effort, have strong exhibits, it is the middle floor, the one devoted to The Final Solution, that most troubles the soul.

Here can be found a 15-ton Karlsruhe freight car that transported inmates to the camps, as well as bunks and ration bowls from Auschwitz, simple forms that appear to actually radiate misery and evil. There are canisters that held the Zyklon-B gas used in mass killings and fiberglass castings of the infamous Arbeit macht frei (“Work leads to freedom”) gates of Auschwitz, of gas chamber doors from Majdanek, of crematoria doors from Mathausen. And all that, somehow, is not the worst of it.

There is a room, specially ventilated but still foul-smelling, that contains 4,000 shoes, a fraction of the 100,000 pairs the Nazis collected at Majdanek, Poland, for possible reuse. These impossible collections, like the piles of scissors, brushes and cutlery seen earlier on the floor and the blown-up photograph of hair shorn from 40,000 women, emphasize both the awful scale and the personal agony of what was done to those who fell afoul of German displeasure. “We are the shoes, we are the last witness,” a poem translated from the Yiddish begins simply on the wall. And so it seems.

Similarly affecting is a tower of photographs first visible on the fourth floor. It is part of a collection of 6,000 shots of the thriving Jewish community of Ejszyszki in Poland, taken over the course of half a century and giving, with its scenes of boaters, skiers, children and lovers, a sense of what the ordinary life of Eastern European Jews was like. The tour path bisects the tower again on the third floor, where one learns the stark fact that “900 years of Jewish life and culture came to an end in two days. Today no Jews live here.”

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Absorbing this hellish story is not easy. It is a nightmare that no amount of light can banish, and not even the presence of a beautifully designed Hall of Remembrance, intended as a space for reflection but much less used than the rest of the museum, can dispel the gloom. Not only because the exhibits underline how little the world did to stop the catastrophe, but also because nothing you see anywhere gives any reason to believe that it couldn’t happen again.

In fact, the opposite thoughts often come to mind. Though the museum makes serious attempts to broaden its focus by detailing the persecutions of Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents as well as Jews, some of the comments written into loose-leaf binders at the exhibit’s end (“What about Vietnam and black slaves in the U.S.?,” “Focus on what is right, focus on Jesus”) indicate that the intended universal message has been lost on some people.

Similarly, during my October visit, I witnessed a shouting match between two museumgoers who were elbowing each other in order to get, of all things, a better view of atrocity newsreels. “All right, stand there,” the man finally said, retreating, to which the woman replied, “I don’t need your favors.” “I apologized.” “After the fact.” Didn’t they learn anything from what they’d seen?

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In theory, Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, as its name testifies, is set up specifically to insure that it won’t happen again. Located in a somber building on Pico Boulevard in West L.A. that also houses its parent organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Museum of Tolerance means well but is noticeably less successful in the impact it makes than its opposite number in Washington.

For one thing, this museum doubtless functions best as a teaching tool for young people, not a required stop, as the D.C. one is, for adults who are already familiar with the Holocaust. For another, though it may seem unfair to say so, an air of show business hangs over this museum, starting with the fact that it prints favorable reviews on the cover of its brochure, much like a quote ad for a hot movie or show.

The Museum of Tolerance is divided into two parts. The first begins with a gimmicky pair of entrance doors, one labeled Prejudiced, the other Unprejudiced. Only one of the doors opens, and if you can guess which one you have a sense of the kinds of exhibits that are found behind it. Interactive with a vengeance, these displays teach fine lessons but they never surprise you.

The same is true of the Holocaust section of the museum, which does almost totally without artifacts but rather concentrates on clay figure dioramas and a heavy-handed, voice-over narration that predigests the Holocaust and beams it back out in a way that is supposed to ensure that everyone gets the message.

Lines like “millions passed through gates like these never to return” and “they sang songs about tomorrow even when there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow,” combined with a setup that makes it impossible for visitors to experience the exhibits on their own, gives the whole place the unfortunate feeling of an indoctrination center, one that will likely end up preaching to the converted more than the Washington museum thinks is proper.

Still, even in the fallible Museum of Tolerance, the enormity of what happened in Europe, the unimaginable scale the killings were done on, almost suffocates you with its terrible weight. As problematical as Holocaust museums feel to one going in, on the way out the feeling is inescapable that, to paraphrase Arthur Miller, a terrible thing has happened and attention must be finally paid.

GUIDEBOOK

Museums of Remembrance

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Address: 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20024-2150. Telephone: (202) 488-0400 for general information. Hours: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily. Admission: free, but tickets are needed. Advance tickets available from TicketMaster (202-432-7328 or 800-551-7328) for $3 per ticket, plus $1.25 per order. Buying tickets two to three weeks in advance is recommended. Same-day tickets are handed out at the museum beginning at 8:30 a.m., with lines often forming earlier. Exhibits may not be suitable for children under 11.

Museum of Tolerance. Address: 9786 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90035. Tel.: (310) 553-8403. Hours: Mon.-Thurs., 10 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 10-3:30; Sundays, 10:30-7:30; closed Saturdays, holidays. Admission: adults, $7.50; senior citizens, $5.50; students, $4.50; children 3-12, $2.50. Advance tickets recommended Fridays, Sundays, holidays; tel. (310) 553-9036, Ext. 319, or though TicketMaster. Mandatory tours last 2 1/2 hours and start every 12 minutes. Validated parking available.