A pair of spectacles will sit in the new Museum of Holocaust History at Yad Vashem an ordinary pair of glasses, with an extraordinary history. Unlike their owner, these spectacles survived the Holocaust and testify to what occurred in Europe more than 60 years ago.

The spectacles belonged to Bluma Wallach, from Lodz, Poland. Bluma arrived at Birkenau concentration camp with her young daughter, Tula. During the selektion that immediately followed, Bluma gave her glasses to her daughter for safekeeping. Tula kept hold of the glasses even after her mother was gassed shortly after their arrival at the camp. She held on to them during her imprisonment at Auschwitz, and later in Ravensbrück. After she was liberated, she kept them for yet another 45 years. Tula eventually donated them to Yad Vashem, because, in her own words, “this is the place they really belong.”

For Tula, these glasses represent an entire world a life, a face, and a memory. They will be displayed in the new Museum along with photos from the renowned Auschwitz Album (showing the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia), as well as survivor testimonies, film segments, and documents.

The new Holocaust History Museum will occupy over 3,000 square meters and will be situated, for the most part, underground. It is being built as an integral component of the “Yad Vashem 2001” masterplan and the new Museum Complex to open in late 2004. The Complex will include the Holocaust History Museum with a new Hall of Names, a Museum of Holocaust Art, an Exhibitions Pavilion, a Learning Center, and a Visual Center.

The new Museum will be founded on two mainstays: providing information and creating an experiential dimension. Similar to other historical museums, it will be both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in nature, combining documentation, testimonies, artifacts, film, literature, diaries, letters, and works of art. The synthesis of all these means of personal expression will form the special “story” that the Museum wishes to impart: For no history museum, and certainly no museum that deals with the history of the Holocaust, can exist if it does not tell a story.

Being a Jewish museum, the new Holocaust History Museum will present a uniquely Jewish narrative. Using the relics, writings, and artwork of the victims, it will tell the story of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, emphasizing the Jews as subjects, rather than objects in Nazi hands. It is impossible to understand the Holocaust and absorb its meaning without learning about those who were most directly affected: the victims and the survivors.

Zuzia

The perspective of the individual will form another keystone of the Museum. The display will emphasize the unique human stories of the Jewish population in Europe during those terrible years. Visitors will be encouraged to look each victim in the eye and get to know him or her as closely as possible. For example, visitors may suddenly come across the scarred head of an old doll attached to a piece of fabric. The makeshift toy donated to Yad Vashem by Yael (Zofia) Rosner was Rosner’s sole companion, confidante, and family during her days alone in the Warsaw ghetto. Her mother made the doll (‘Zuzia’) to keep Rosner company while she disappeared on missions for the underground.

Rosner’s remarkable story will be displayed alongside the doll, together with authentic photographs depicting scenes of daily life in the ghetto: crowded streets, children lying helplessly on the sidewalks, people dying of starvation and disease. As visitors enter this display area, the concrete floor will change to cobblestones brought to Yad Vashem from the remnants of the Warsaw ghetto. The showcases will display pages from the famous “Oneg Shabbat” archives, created at the time of the ghetto and regarded today as one of the most important Jewish documentary sources on the Holocaust. In order to highlight the individual in the story, great efforts were made in identifying the names of people in the photos, uncover their stories, collect personal artifacts, and research the background of the display items.

Picture from The Auschwitz Album

In attempting to deepen the understanding of what occurred during the Shoah and contend with its astounding, almost inconceivable components, general phenomena will be highlighted through single-story examples. For example, at the end of the war, as the Nazi armies were retreating, the Germans took the last surviving camp inmates on forced death marches. These difficult journeys resulted in the deaths of many thousands of prisoners, often only weeks or days before liberation. To help visitors comprehend these terrible ordeals, the new Museum will focus on one such death march which began with some 1,000 women. During their harrowing journey, they encountered locals who helped them, but many more who watched in silence or worse, actively participated in the murder of hundreds. The display will include the names of these women, the places they passed through, their photographs affixed to survivor testimonies, and remaining objects from the march. Thus the narrative will move from the individual story to the general phenomenon and back to the particular, allowing visitors to gain knowledge of the historical event, while relating to the victims’ appalling experiences.

This is the strength of the new Museum to elicit visitors’ empathy, understanding, and compassion for victims of the Shoah. The decision to include the new Hall of Names as an integral part of the new Museum exemplifies this aim. Inside this vast archive of documentation about Holocaust victims, visitors will encounter the true synthesis of empirical information and personal stories in the form of Pages of Testimony. These Pages each representing an entire life that was lost contain biographical details of the victim and his or her picture,if any survived. From the Hall of Names, visitors will continue on to the last section of the new Museum, and then to the balcony that offers a view of present day Jerusalem. It is Yad Vashem’s hope that the compassion generated by the new Holocaust History Museum will give visitors a more meaningful experience, and will raise their personal commitment to higher moral values today and in the future. If visitors leave with the feeling that the events of the Shoah are relevant to their identity and lives, they will assume a far greater responsibility for their conduct as human beings. The Holocaust is not a closed chapter in human history, but rather an integral component in the development of our culture and the fashioning of our existence. Thus Yad Vashem on the Mount of Remembrance (Har HaZikaron), Jerusalem is both a warning beacon against the extreme evil of the past, and a light of hope for the future.

Avner Shalev is Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate and the Chief Curator of the New Museum of Holocaust History

• 1958: The first permanent exhibit opened in the Yad Vashem administration building, containing 163 items—most of which were documents.

• 1959: The first art exhibition opened in the Yad Vashem administration building featuring 70 paintings

• 1962: In the wake of the Eichmann Trial, a new exhibit entitled “Warning and Witness: The Murder of the Jewish People of Europe” opened in the Yad Vashem administration building. Through documents and photographs, the exhibit depicted the world destroyed in the Holocaust and how it was destroyed

• 1965: A museum building was opened housing an Exhibition Hall on the first floor and the Hall of Names on the second floor. An historical exhibit occupied the right side of the Exhibition Hall and a small art display stood on the left

• 1973: A new, more extensive permanent exhibit was established in the museum building chronicling the Shoah through enlarged photographs and explanatory texts mounted on somber black walls

• 1982: An Art Museum, Auditorium, and Sculpture Garden were dedicated in the presence of French President François Mitterand. From the mid 1990s, the Art Museum has been used to display temporary exhibits

• 1993: An updated, remodeled section of the permanent historical exhibit opened in the museum building. The new decor, which updated both the exhibit’s content and style, contained elements reminiscent of the camps, trains, and barbed wire