Avner Shalev tried to keep it real. The director of Jerusalem’s recently renovated Holocaust History Museum, Yad Vashem, never liked the Disneyland feel of some rival exhibitions. Walking a reporter through the galleries, he gestures toward the authentic relics of a historical tragedy: documents, diaries — even lampposts recovered from the Warsaw ghetto. Toward the end of the tour, Shalev approaches a large beige model of the crematorium at Birkenau, by Polish sculptor Mieczyslaw Stobierski. It’s powerful — but it also breaks Shalev’s own rule about including reproductions. "Auschwitz has one," he says with a shrug. "Washington also commissioned one. I thought we should have one." Not even history, it seems, is free from the invisible hand of competition.
In recent years the world’s museums commemorating the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, have sprung up all over the world. Paris recently renovated its Holocaust museum. Ukraine’s is under construction. The United States is now home to more than 100. Yad Vashem opened in 1957 — three years before the first televised presidential debate and decades before anyone had ever dreamed up a DVD. Now the museum has to compete for its guests’ attention with the alluring distractions of the media age. The curators have done their best, installing more than 100 flat-screen TVs playing video clips of survivor stories. Life-size black-and-white photographs of the murdered are projected on a wall. Today’s kids may be harder to keep engaged. But Shalev also attributes the boom in Holocaust memorials to their open minds. "They don’t have to play with these guilt feelings, and suppress, and put aside," he says.
There is plenty in the new museum that cries out to be suppressed. One chilling exhibit commemorates the slaughter in Ponary, Lithuania, where over a period of four years more than 70,000 Jews were lined up and shot dead, their bodies tumbling into pits. The curators have carved a deep cavity in the museum floor to symbolize the mass graves, lit only by a frail shaft of sunlight.
Not all the exhibits rely on new technology. Some of the most powerful stories are told through the timeless tools of good narrative. The new museum opens with a short video depicting Jewish life in Europe before the Nazi invasion — a collection of simple, carefree images.
Trenches crisscross the central corridor, marking the turning points in the 12-year story and guiding visitors through the galleries. The centerpiece is a majestic dome known as the Hall of Names; binders of documents line the walls, and hundreds of individual portraits of the dead are displayed along the dome. "Each time I’m in here, another one catches my eye," Shalev says, craning his neck.
The binders in the Hall of Names represent just a fraction of the museum’s 100 million document archives, most of which never see a gallery wall. Despite the growing demand from museums around the world, Yad Vashem still often gets first pick of the artifacts offered up by Holocaust survivors. "They know that here it will be kept in a very professional manner for hundreds of years," says Shalev. They’d better; if his museum doesn’t keep pace with the times, there will always be another taker. What does Yad Vashem do to attract its guests