Washington, D.C. -- A Walk Through The Holocaust Museum

WASHINGTON - Whether or not it belongs here, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum - which opens to the public this week - is a triumph of the will of those who survived the Nazi death camps and an eerie testimonial to the power of architecture.

From the moment a visitor steps through the door he or she is a prisoner. A prisoner, first, to the captivating design of architect James Ingo Freed, who has created a splendidly horrific building that evokes the awful efficiency of German industrial genocide. A prisoner, ultimately, to the sense of shared and unshakable guilt instilled by the museum's relentless reprise of the rise of Hitler and the collapse of any claim that there is, at very bottom, some limit to human depravity.

The building's north and south entrances both open into the Hall of Remembrance, where everything is askew. The floor is gray stone, the walls are bolted iron plates painted Wehrmacht gray, the reception desk is armor-plated. The ceiling is a high vault of massive steel beams and glass skylights that don't line up with each other or the axis of the atrium. The great staircase is not grand but grim, narrowing like a cattle chute. The eye is fooled and fooled again; we're being deliberately disoriented.

On either hand are archways that echo the entrances to the gas chambers and ovens into which the millions went. The floor is rent by a diagonal fault, paved with glass blocks and backlighted for emphasis, that threatens to yawn open and swallow us up.

What to do? Where to go next? We are purposely left uncertain. The full diabolism of Freed's design will only become apparent when the hall is full of tourists, mom and dad and the kids turning their innocent, puzzled faces this way and that way, tentatively half-smiling like the Jewish families in the grainy film clips we've seen again and again in the documentaries.

The visitor seems to have choices, but it will turn out that turning left leads to death, to the right is death, straight ahead is death; this is, first and last, a museum of death.

The correct turn is toward the ovens, er, elevators, whose doors are massive gray steel plates under oppressive archways. Along the way each visitor is issued a "passport," matching her or him by age and sex with a person who was persecuted by the Nazis. From time to time on this journey through hell the passport will be stamped and updated with descriptions of what became of our chance-met partner.

Once we're sealed in the elevators, a video monitor begins to play back films taken in the spring of 1945 of American GIs telling what they found when they liberated the death camps. The doors open - not the ones we entered by but, unexpectedly, those on the opposite side of the car. Immediately we are face-to-face with life-size-death-size-photographs of a pyre at Ohrdruf, in central Germany, layered with the half-burned corpses of prisoners who were murdered at a frantic pace because the Allied armies were drawing near.

This stick-to-itiveness, this devotion to duty under fire, this determination to complete the assigned task, was seen again and again as Allied armies overran the hundreds of murder factories in Germany and Poland. The soldiers would hear gunfire and explosions, they'd hit the dirt and cautiously reconnoiter, and then they'd find the camps drenched in fresh blood, smoking corpses, the guards all asweat from exertion as much as fear.

This brutal introduction to the realities of the Holocaust, including footage shot by filmmaker George Stevens at Dachau, is a stomach-turning shock that gives fair warning of what's to come.

Yet of all the horrors the museum displays, none is more memorable than the second section of the exhibit, which recounts the rise of Hitler and the step-by-step disenfranchisement and debasement of the Jews, not in the savage passion of war but as a coolly calculated campaign to unite the nation by creating an ethnic enemy. Because the Jews looked so much like everybody else, the Germans had to tag them with yellow stars.

There was not only book burning but book writing: One of the most heart-searing objects in the museum is "The Poison Mushroom," a look-and-say children's book that portrays Jews as evil trolls lusting to do unspeakable things to Christian children they waylay.

Opposite that display is what may yet turn out to be the millennium's most fearful invention: the IBM punch-card computer that made it possible for the Germans to identify, track down, isolate and gather up the Jews. Willy Heidinger, managing director of IBM's German subsidiary, painted this glowing picture of how the machine with a brain would serve human progress:

"We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation on a little card . . . a task that provides the physician of the German body politic (Hitler) with the material he needs. We have firm confidence in our physician and will follow his orders blindly. Heil to the German people and their leader!"

On we go to Kristallnacht, the carefully orchestrated "Night of Broken Glass" in which Jews were harassed and some murdered while their homes, shops and synagogues were shattered; in one of the exquisitely outrageous turns of Nazi humor, rich Jews are heavily fined to pay for the damage and disturbance. Borders begin to close. Walls begin to transform Jewish neighborhoods into stifling ghettos, where hunger and overcrowding begin to spawn desperation and disease.

Slumping under the assault of all this dreary cruelty, the visitor is momentarily relieved when the exhibit leads to a brightly sunlit walkway above the atrium. But alas the view is of what looks like guard towers and factory skylights, and anyway much of the view through the glassed sides is obscured by the etched names of communities whose Jewish populations were decimated or destroyed by the Nazis: Aachen to Zwingenberg in Germany; Abramowo to Syrmuny in Poland; Akershus to Vestfold in Norway. . . .

Next comes the media center, a grim series of cubicles in which we're invited to take seats and search through interactive videos to explore how the events in Germany were seen from outside: What did the world know, and when did they know it. It doesn't take long to show that we all knew pretty much all about it from the beginning.

And now, now, we descend into hell. The path leads downward from the media center through a three-story display of more than a thousand photographs of the 4,000 Jews of Eishishok (also known as Ejszyszki). All but 29 of the Lithuanian village's Jews were wiped out in 1941 by a German Einsatzgruppen, one of the mobile extermination squads that ranged along the rear and flanks of the conquering armies. The photographs are arrayed in a tapering column, very like a chimney, which the walkway passes through, curls back upon itself and passes through again.

Now we are in the camps. The Potemkin village of Theresientstadt, Czechoslovakia, prettified by the Nazis for the benefit of inspectors from the International Red Cross; a reconstructed dormitory where men slept six abreast in cubicles unfit for one; a cast of the walkway, paved with crushed headstones from a Jewish cemetery, that led from Treblinka's slave-labor camp to its killing center; the uprising and downfall of the Warsaw Ghetto; a boxcar from the endless stream that crisscrossed Europe filled with the dead, the dying and those who were to die.

Visitors made of sterner stuff than this one may emerge with more-coherent memories than mine of the details of the latter sections of the permanent exhibition. Although I spent five unbroken hours there, I did not examine all the artifacts, nor read all the labels, nor watch all the videos of people starving and being beaten and shot and experimented on and bulldozed into mass graves and murdered even after the war was over and the Poles went back to the normal pogroms.

In the end I stopped looking. I walked out into the soft air of spring and thanked whatever gods there are for whatever good there is.

IF YOU GO:

-- Admission to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is free, though tickets will be necessary for several months until the first rush of visitors subsides. Same-day tickets can be acquired through the museum box office, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington, D.C. Purchase advance tickets through Ticketmaster,1-800-551-7328. There is a $3.50 service fee per ticket. Groups of 10 or more should contact the museum's scheduler for tickets, 1-202-488-0400. Holocaust museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day but Christmas.