Los Angeles -- Museum Of Tolerance Brings Prejudice Home

LOS ANGELES - The first thing you notice at the Museum of Tolerance is the security. As you drive into the underground garage a guard stops you and takes down your license number. To enter the museum itself, you pass through an airport-type metal detector.

The irony is sad and chilling. A facility whose purpose is to promote peace and tolerance must be ever on the alert for terrorism. That jolt sets the tone for the journey you are about to take.

The $50-million Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance, part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, opened in 1993. Unlike other Holocaust museums, it is more than a collection of artifacts and information from the explosion of evil that led to the murder of 12 million people - about half of them Jews - in Hitler's death camps.

Instead of just recalling an event 50 years in the past, the museum uses the Nazis' genocide as a starting point to explore the ideas that make genocide possible - ideas that continue to thrive throughout the world. And don't think you'll get away with looking only at exhibits: this museum forces you to look at yourself.

The guide at the beginning of my tour was a Holocaust survivor. Noting his name and accent, a woman in the group asked, "Are you Hungarian?" No, George Corey said, he was Jewish. As he led us down a spiral ramp, a metaphoric descent into hell, he explained the Hungarian government had informed him of the distinction in 1939.

`Everyone is prejudiced'

To get into what's called the museum's Tolerancenter, the first exhibit section, we had to choose the door marked "Prejudiced" or the one labeled "Unprejudiced." I tried the latter. It was locked. It always is, Corey said, because no one is without prejudice. Then he turned us loose to explore.

Interactive exhibits challenge visitors to think, think, think. One features heads that pop up to expose ethnic stereotypes. Another lets you try to identify offensive words as they flash on a video screen. In a tunnel called the Whisper Gallery, voices hiss racist and sexist taunts as you walk through.

Most heart-wrenching to me was the six-screen interactive exhibit on the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I lived in Los Angeles until a year ago and mostly bought into the idea that we all got along just fine. The museum's video clips of the savage beating of Rodney G. King by four white police officers and the violence that erupted when those officers were acquitted a year later brought back the searing pain of seeing that belief go up in smoke.

Getting to the kids

I went with a group of about 20 juvenile offenders into the next exhibit, a film about three other 20th-century genocides. The teenage boys were there on a court program, their chaperone told me. They seemed little moved by the government-sponsored mass killings in Turkey, Cambodia ("What's a Cambodian?" one asked) and South America.

But after they left the little screening room, they sat before a video wall that showed scenes from the American civil rights movement. In one, a white patrolman verbally abused a calm, courageous black man who wanted to attend church. When the patrol officer spat out that most vicious racial epithet, my tough young companions - most of whom were minority members - gasped and went still as stone. From that moment on, they paid attention.

Prejudice against minorities in the United States - in words, deeds and carefully disguised thoughts - threads through the Tolerancenter exhibits. By the time you reach the end of that section, you figure out that the chasm between the every-day bias in this country and the government fueled anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust is not as broad as we like to think. Into the Holocaust

Now consider the Holocaust. A team of faceless narrators takes you from the earliest beginnings of Hitler's rise through the steady buildup of Nazi power in Germany. Each visitor gets a "passport" with the name and photo of a child victim of the Nazis. You won't find out that child's fate until you reach the end of the section.

The scene around you grows grimmer as you move forward in time. At a prewar Berlin cafe, tension and denial color the conversations. Disembodied voices recreate the 1942 Wannsee Conference where Reinhard Heydrich outlined his plan for the "final solution to the Jewish problem." In the Warsaw ghetto, desperate Jews fight off Nazi attempts to round them up for shipment to their doom. Finally, you reach a full size re-creation of the gates of Auschwitz.

Beyond is the stark, concrete-walled Hall of Testimony, where videos present the stories of Holocaust survivors. At its exit, a video screen challenges you to decide "Who was responsible?" Was it fanatical leaders who manipulated? Blind followers? Ordinary people who remained silent?

Visitors have come from all over the nation and abroad. The guide leading the juvenile offenders told us some guests have introduced themselves to her as Oskar Schindler's Jews.

During the school year, the Museum of Tolerance sometimes sees 1,200 students visit in a day. Police officials, colleges and courts also use it as a source of training and enlightenment. This has translated to about 250,000 visitors a year facing the museum's message that the Holocaust began not with the killings at Auschwitz, not with the violence of Kristallnacht, but with average people's toleration of bigotry and hate.

A guest book at the end of the three-hour tour records reactions to the museum. Devastating. Heartbreaking. Moving. A Swiss visitor wrote in German, "Let us never forget."

And this from a German: "Please forgive us." ----------------------------------------------------------------- More information

-- The Museum of Tolerance is at 9786 W. Pico Blvd., at the corner of Roxbury, in West Los Angeles. Telephone: (310) 553 9036.

-- Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for age 62 and older, $5 for students with ID, $3 for children ages 3-12. Tickets are sold first-come, first-served. Because of the crowds on Sundays, visitors should try to arrive by 1 p.m. The average tour lasts 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

Eileen Heyes is a writer based in Raleigh, N.C.