The Holocaust at Human Scale

Shoes that belonged to Jews killed by the Nazis are displayed at the new Holocaust History Museum, part of the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. (Pool Photo/Goran Tomasevic Via AP)

Israeli museum officials and historians combed through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and diaries in the vast Yad Vashem archives, matching them with photographs of victims. They collected more than 2,500 artifacts, including part of a cattle car used to transport victims, scarred wooden bunk beds from Auschwitz and a rusted soup vat from Gross-Rosen, two Nazi camps in occupied Poland. The goal, officials said, was to humanize an event long depicted exclusively in terms of its dehumanizing elements.

Warsaw, which is redeveloping its original Jewish ghetto, donated hundreds of original cobblestones and yards of trolley tracks to re-create a scene from Leszno Street, complete with a lamppost gouged by shrapnel and a wooden bench missing a few slats.

As museum visitors stroll down the street, doorways open into homes and businesses, including a theater where a movie titled "The Wife of the Rabbi" was playing. Photographs of men in tattered coats and of emaciated, sobbing children flash across walls, and the sounds of shouting voices and clattering hoofs are piped through the hall.

While the museum is dedicated primarily to the experience of Jews, it also reflects changes in historical interpretation of events of the time.

"Forty or fifty years ago, we tended to put the emphasis on Hitler as being a grand architect who designed everything and gave orders," said historian Michman. "We now know he was important, but he only set the framework. The collaboration of many spheres in the bureaucracy and among the German and European population was the major reason why so many people could have been exterminated."

Interspersed throughout the exhibits in the 45,000-square-foot museum are notes and letters written by low-level German military officers that illustrate complicity at lower levels of the Nazi bureaucracy. Beneath photographs of members of the Einsatzgruppen unit shooting men who had been forced to dig their own graves in a forest clearing near Belgrade in October 1941, curators have placed this notation from the unit's records: "The execution was carried out by rifle fire at a distance of 12 meters. . . . 180 people were shot. Everything was concluded by 6:30 p.m. The unit returned to the camp with a satisfied feeling."

After traversing the museum's depictions of death camps, death marches and death trains, of struggles for survival and searches for lost family members, visitors emerge from the gray concrete hallway onto a cantilevered balcony with a view of forested hillsides and a sudden blast of pine-scented breezes.

"We end it without any statement," said Yehuda Bauer, one of Israel's most renowned professors of Holocaust studies, who helped conceptualize the new museum. "You simply go out to the balcony and look at Jerusalem. You don't need to say anything more. No verbal message, no lesson. You just go out and see for yourself."

Researcher Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.