Holocaust Museum: How Grim, How Graphic Should It Be?

WASHINGTON - The question was whether to display the hair. Great crinkled mounds of it, bales of it from Auschwitz-Birkenau, there on the museum floor, combed human hair saved from the time of the Holocaust. Hair makes good matting for furniture and mattresses, and the Nazis had used some of it for rope and cords. The finest hair was woven into socks for their U-boat sailors.

Now the question for the museum's content committee was whether to put the hair on display or just show a large photograph of it. It was a question of realism, taste and impact. The hair was such a graphic and sorrowful way to illustrate what had happened.

Among the committee and the staff, the men had no problem displaying the hair; the women were against it. Finally, the question was answered when two women on the committee, both of them survivors of the death camps, said to the men: "That could be my mother's hair."

For decades, the problem of Holocaust survivors and teachers has been how to translate the incomprehensible into words and images. How to present evil and its ugliness in an honest fashion while at the same time drawing people in to learn.

But where to draw the line? Will this display teach or distract? Will it create empathy or disgust?

The choices made will be evident as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opens with enormous publicity and ceremony marking the completion of 13 years of planning and collecting. An extraordinary exhibition of humankind's inhumanity, it is also an institutional expression of the resolve that the world must never again allow such genocidal plans.

Aimed at mass education, it is unlike more neutral museum exhibitions. A few blocks away, for instance, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum celebrates the technology of flight but makes little judgment between Germany's V-1 rocket that terrorized London during the blitz and the small but lofty presence of the Spirit of St. Louis.

"The place is ultimately about values," explained Naomi Paiss, the Holocaust museum's director of communications. "The selection of every photograph is about values."

Each object was chosen to advance the narrative and trace the events of the Holocaust, from the Nazi rise to power in 1933 to the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945.

It is a lesson in 20th century European history and, considering the recent headlines about "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, there is a stab of recognition at photos of hapless refugees and ghetto dwellers being rounded up and imprisoned behind barbed wire.

It is history and metaphor. It is impossible to go through and not make comparisons and feel that the ethnic tribalism of the 1990s appears much like that of 60 years ago.

One of the most powerful exhibits does not show death but a three-story tower of formal portraits and snapshots of picnics and weddings of the 3,500 members of the Jewish community of Ejszyszki, then in Poland and now in Lithuania. The normalcy of their images is what makes their fate all the more vivid and haunting. Except for a few who escaped, all the villagers were machine-gunned over a two-day period in September 1941.

Said Stephen Goodell, the museum's director of education projects: "We don't answer the why; we can answer by whom and to whom and how and when, but no one can answer why."

The decision to place the museum on the National Mall, Washington's grassy centerpiece that is in essence the nation's front yard, is controversial. The Holocaust was a European event, so where does the United States fit in?

Certainly a museum to memorialize the slaughter of American Indians or to display the shame of slavery would be more fitting expressions of national history. Perhaps in response to such feelings, there are plans to move the National Museum of the American Indian from New York to Washington by the end of the decade and to transform one of the original Smithsonian buildings into a Museum of African-American History.

The Holocaust museum, built on nearly two acres donated by the federal government, has carefully Americanized the permanent exhibit by initially focusing visitors on the liberation of the concentration camps by U.S. troops and highlighting, in the words of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the importance of not letting the world forget the Holocaust.

Farther along, it explains that the U.S. government, if not the American people, knew about the systematic campaign of deaths in the concentration camps but chose not to destroy the gas chambers or the rail lines leading to them in favor of more military and industrial targets.

A wall-size blowup of Army intelligence photos, taken from the bomb-bay doors of a plane on its way to a nearby target, displays what one camp was used for. And a description nearby gives the astounding rationale for not doing more. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy wrote to the World Jewish Congress that if the Allies bombed concentration camps, the Nazis would show "even more vindictive action."

"It's not about trying to make people feel guilty, but to make them feel responsible," Paiss said.

Byron Sherwin of Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago, where the nation's first Holocaust exhibit opened two decades ago, put it another way: Holocausts are possible not only because of the perpetrators but also because of the bystanders.

The Washington, D.C., memorial building, by James Ingo Freed, outwardly blends in with its neighbors, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the old Victorian brick Auditors Building. It overlooks a wide lawn down to the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial.

Inside, everything is arched and raw: cold metal and stone; glass bridges suggest the footbridges that linked the ghetto neighborhoods of Lodz, Poland; inverted steel triangles bolted to the brick walls are symbolic of patches worn in death camps; even the elevators are industrial and claustrophobic and bear a resemblance to oven doors.

The intent of the architecture and the use of the artifacts are vigorous and visceral, acknowledged Ralph Applebaum, who designed the permanent exhibit. Applebaum said he tried not to overdesign and bleach out the horror, nor to add aesthetic extras.

The museum uses a technique in place at the new Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, giving each visitor an identity card with the name of a real Holocaust victim. The card can be inserted in machines along the way to show what was happening to that person in different years.

"We want to be a museum of empathy, to create some bond or connection between the visitor and those who died," Paiss said. "In that way, we are trying to give back to the victims some of their individuality, a piece of their life."

President Clinton is expected to attend the opening ceremony tomorrow, along with Israeli President Chaim Herzog, Polish President Lech Walesa, Czech leader Vaclav Havel and leaders of Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania. Other European nations, including Germany, are sending lower-ranking officials. The museum will open to the public next Monday.

The museum's description of life in a ghetto comes to an abrupt, emotional juncture when visitors find themselves at the end of a walk and see only four options for getting out. Three are symbolic: a wooden cart to carry away corpses, a rusted sewer cap and a small, oil-soaked workbench under which some people hid for weeks in hopes of evading Nazi roundups.

The exit that most must walk through, however, is a railway freight car, one that actually transported Jews to the Treblinka death camp. (Applebaum had to design a fifth choice, a bypass around that part of the exhibit, when a concentration-camp survivor said she couldn't walk into that railway car again.)

"As a healthy male, you would have been sent to the labor camps," Paiss remarks in a careful, flat tone. "I, as a mother with young children, would have been sent to be gassed."