Remembering horror, evil and death

MAY 20—Our senses and spirits were assaulted today. A visit to the Holocaust Museum (Yad Vashem) will do that to you. This spare but unsparing chronicle of the stupendous atrocity against Jews in World War 2 is intended to horrify. It’s an effort to proclaim to the world: “Never again.”

Presented unabashedly from Jewish viewpoint, the museum leads visitors through a chronological and thematic record of events from the Nazi rise to power, through the darkest years of the Holocaust and into the brighter promise of a homeland for the Jews.

The longest and hardest part is the bruising voyage into the heart of darkness as images, artifacts and survivor testimonies document the brutality and terror of the worst years. Grainy black and white movies show great cruelty in dreadful action—bodies bulldozed into mass graves or corralled into gas chambers. We witness the death industry in high gear.

We see the faces of the desperate, including children. We see skeletal bodies being put through brutal paces and hard work. We walk on a glass floor over a sobering collection of thousands of shoes. Survivors recount stories too horrible to imagine. We hear of the neglect of the rest of the world, which one observer described as “the icy Arctic indifference of nations.”

We also see instances of the kindness of strangers, of non-Jews who helped at great risk to themselves. They are honoured. But they were too few and far between.

Liberation did come—eventually. By then 6,000,000 Jews were dead and those who remained faced insurmountable difficulties. The museum leads visitors inexorably to the conclusion that an independent Jewish nation state is the only way to solve the problem of the Jews. It came to pass. The refining fire helped to forge the national identity that formed the state of Israel 60 years ago.