Depth and despair

Nearly 63 years later, the words still burn forth from the yellowed, fragile scrap of cardboard-like paper on which they were written in the greatest of haste, yet somehow miraculously preserved. “My darlings! I am on a train,” Esther Frankel, a Polish Jew who was born Esther Horonchik, wrote to her family in Paris in August 1942 as she was being deported to Auschwitz. She scrawled the words on a postcard she tossed out the window of the eastbound train in desperation, hoping it might find its way to them.

Terrified though she might have been, the young mother could think only of her 2-year-old son, from whom she had been separated en route to the death camp.

“My Richard -- I do not know what became of him,” she wrote in her brief note, now painstakingly preserved under glass in Israel’s new Holocaust museum, along with hundreds of other newly exhibited personal artifacts of cataclysm. “Save my child, my innocent baby! He is probably crying bitterly.” Neither she nor her small son was ever heard from again.

Frankel’s story was recounted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he dedicated a landmark addition to Israel’s sprawling Yad Vashem complex. Designed by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, the new history museum, together with a companion art museum, opens to the public today.

“Esther Horonchik cries out the cry of the biblical Job,” Sharon told assembled dignitaries at the inaugural ceremony, some of whom dabbed at their eyes as he spoke. The 77-year-old Israeli leader’s voice cracked and rose as he quoted the ancient Hebrew verse: “Cover not my blood, O earth!”

Few incantations could have been more strikingly symbolic, because the new museum, a daring design more than 10 years in the making, cuts deep beneath the soil of Jerusalem, tunneling its way through the heart of a rocky mountain on the city’s edge.

The wedge-like structure, illuminated from above by a narrow glass prism, literally descends into darkness and emerges in light on the opposite end of its 600-foot span -- a wrenching journey with every bit of the metaphorical weight Safdie intended it to carry.

“If I had taken the traditional approach and designed a building to sit on top of the hill, it would have overwhelmed the pastoral quality of the site,” said Safdie, whose involvement with Yad Vashem dates back almost 30 years. “So I started thinking about the idea of going underground, of descending into the depths and climbing out from them again.” Yad Vashem, whose name translates as “a monument and a name,” has been a national touchstone since its inauguration in 1953 as an archive, memorial and study center in the young Jewish state. Its main museum, one of the first of its kind in the world, did not open until two decades later.

Groundbreaking though they were at the time, Yad Vashem’s flagship exhibits had taken on something of a frozen, static quality, its curators acknowledge, especially in contrast to innovative Holocaust museums opening elsewhere in recent years, for example, in Washington, D.C.

“We wanted to find a new language for conveying this story -- showing it in all its enormous scope, yet finding ways of presenting it in simple and universally recognizable human terms,” said curator Yehudit Shendar, whose grandparents died in the Holocaust. “We wanted to give those who suffered and died a voice, a face.”

The $56-million museum strives for authenticity, giving many of its exhibits a harrowingly tactile intimacy. In nearly all its galleries, room-sized panoramas are offset by related small-scale displays -- photographs, original works of art, creased pages with hand-penned diary entries.

A replica of Leszno Street, the main thoroughfare in the Warsaw Ghetto, features period paving stones, actual tram tracks and lampposts unearthed from a Polish warehouse by Yad Vashem researchers.

An exhibit devoted to the transport of Jews contains a wood-railed “cattle wagon” that made the grim rail passage to the death camps but also a small wooden fishing boat that carried Danish Jews to salvation in Sweden.

Giving meaning to its collection

In the years before the opening of the new museum, Holocaust survivors had donated a haunting array of artifacts to Yad Vashem. One elderly female survivor gave curators the eyeglasses her mother had handed to her for safekeeping just before the older woman was sent to the gas chamber. A doomed mother cut her 11-year-old daughter’s braids and gave them to a neighbor to keep before both were transported to their deaths; the girl’s brother recovered them after the war.

For curators, the psychic weight of these sacred relics accumulated, and lack of a proper place to show them became a gnawing frustration. The new museum gives them much freer rein; it encompasses 45,000 square feet, several times the size of the one it replaces.

The design is deceptively simple: a long central corridor with galleries opening off it on each side. Low-lying divides in the main passageway gently steer a visitor from one display to the next, which are loosely chronological but also arranged by theme: Jewish life in prewar Europe, the gradual tightening of the noose of anti-Semitic laws, the inexorable march to deportations and death camps.

In the clean-lighted expanse of internal space, Safdie wanted nothing superfluous -- “no cladding, no flooring.” The walls are textured gray concrete, deliberately setting a harsh and industrial tone that evokes a sense of growing dread amid the unfolding story of a vast machinery of extermination. “We had thought of using Jerusalem stone, as is done inside and outside so many buildings here,” Shendar said. “But we decided against it, with its warmth and soft color. You could say that we didn’t want it to be too beautiful.”

Unusually, the curators worked from the beginning with Safdie, with both parties striving for unity between the larger architectural vision and the minute details of envisioned exhibits. “It was a curator’s dream, to be involved from the ground floor, as it were,” Shendar said.

In a bold thematic departure from most Holocaust museums, this one takes on the task of humanizing not only the victims but the perpetrators as well.

Scattered throughout the displays are “black boxes” bearing photos and personal details of Germans who dealt with the often banal bureaucratic tasks that made possible the mass killing of millions of Jews: the keeping of registration rolls, the engineering of crematoriums, the organization of far-flung transports.

“We know we might be criticized for this, but we felt it was important to show who these Nazis were as individuals -- that they were not monsters but rather people who did monstrous things,” Shendar said.

At the museum’s heart is the Hall of Names, a circular enclosure filled with an overhead expanse of names and photographs. At viewers’ feet is a deep well, its walls gouged, scar-like, from the hillside’s rough stone.

“I wanted to surround people with these images overhead and direct the view upward toward the light,” Safdie said. “But we also wanted something that penetrated the depths of the Earth, all the way down to the groundwater, which becomes a memory of places we can’t know.” He sighed. “Really, what it is, it’s a deep grave. Everyone instinctively recognizes it as that.”

An abundance of stories to tell

Safdie, who designed the Skirball Center in Los Angeles and many other cultural buildings in Israel, the U.S. and Canada, is no stranger to architectural controversy. His design for the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem was so stark and disturbing that it was initially rejected by the museum’s board. Eventually, a donor who had lost his son in Auschwitz saw the model and insisted it be built.

In a feat of perseverance, Yad Vashem has accumulated the personal histories of 3 million Holocaust victims, which have been posted on a new Internet site. Among the fast-dwindling ranks of survivors, the site has already brought about a number of reunions of long-lost relatives, friends and neighbors.

About 90 of those individual histories are interwoven in the museum’s displays -- “only a tiny number, really, but they are all so vivid that we hope it helps dispel this sense of vastness and anonymity that one associates with the Holocaust,” Shendar said.

“The Nazis took away Jews’ individuality before they took away their lives,” the Yediot Aharonot newspaper wrote in an editorial as the museum was about to be formally inaugurated. “There isn’t a visitor to this museum who can emerge without feeling a sense of personal closeness, and of personal loss.”

Unlike many other Holocaust museums, this one’s chronology, pointedly, does not conclude with the war’s end.

The last of its exhibits documents the creation of the state of Israel, and the final architectural statement echoes that. At the very end of the long main corridor lies a light-struck viewing balcony. Two cantilevered, wing-like walls soar out over a pine-clad hillside, framing a tranquil view of the Jerusalem hills.

“I’m always dubious about gestures like this, but the notion of emerging from the earth very naturally became the central notion,” Safdie said. “After all that people see and experience inside, you step out, and it’s light, it’s rebirth. After everything, even here in this place with all to be seen here -- in the end, a reaffirmation of life.”