Never Forget

By LANCE MORROW WASHINGTON

A story told by an Israeli army colonel while driving through blinding sunlight from the Dead Sea to the Jordan River:

The colonel's parents lost seven children in the Nazi death camps. But the parents survived. After the war they made their way to Israel, where they conceived a son (the colonel), whom they called their "miracle child." Though they doted on him and loved him dearly (as may be imagined), they sent him off at an early age to be raised on a kibbutz -- away from his parents. For the Holocaust, the mother and father felt, had left such a terrible darkness of grief in them, such a residue of adhesive evil, that they feared the communicated memory of it would haunt the child and blight his life. Better he should be a sabra and kibbutznik, raised in the sunshine of Eretz Yisrael.

The politics of memory is complicated. Never remember? Or never forget? Or simply, Never again? Now the parents' generation, the survivors of the Hitler years, are in their 70s and 80s and are dying off. The generation's memory -- along with whatever objects and images and cautionary knowledge may be salvaged -- needs to find permanent residence. Or else it will be lost. This week, a powerful -- and controversial -- fortress against forgetting is being dedicated in Washington.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than a dozen years in planning and construction, has been built at the edge of the mall, L'Enfant's expanse that is a kind of spacious American myth-yard. There the eye sweeps across the Capitol and Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial, the white marbles softened at this time of year by dogwood and cherry blossoms. The mall bespeaks 18th century Enlightenment come to America, a certain lucidity and ideal. The Holocaust museum is like the 20th century Endarkenment, a dense, evil mystery set down in the New World, an ocean away from where it happened.

That is what most of the argument is about. At Washington dinner parties, you hear the questions: Why put it in Washington? Why not in Berlin, say? Or else: Why should the Germans suffer this kind of permanently installed American rebuke, as if the years of Hitler were all of German history? And why would Americans build a memorial and museum to the European Holocaust before installing a remembrance, say, of slavery and the black American struggle, or of the devastation of American Indian life? The premise is that America's sacred statuary memory belongs to things that happened on native grounds. An odor of anti-Semitism sometimes gusts around these dinner tables, the half- stated thought being: It's Jews imposing, trying to push into the American club of myth with their alien memories. Further: Do we have to go through all this again, the hand-wringing, the Holocaust?

Does the Holocaust museum belong? Well, it does. Those who object to it are just as wrong as the other people who (for very different reasons) campaigned against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, calling it a depressive exercise, an insult to the American military and a "black gash of shame." The Vietnam wall transcended the criticisms and became an American shrine.

The Holocaust museum stands beside the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Architect James Freed, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, gave one side of the exterior a sort of bland grandness of facade, a little like the Department of Agriculture as it might have been done by Albert Speer. But the facade, like Speer's overblown neoclassical productions, masks an emptiness, and behind that, a horror. Within, Freed's design encloses all the menacing, grim functionalism, the history and the instruments, of bureaucratically enacted genocide: Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" done up in the Bauhaus of hell.

Freed, who grew up in Nazi Germany but escaped to America in 1939, has twisted the death factory to a surreal dimension. The roof is a procession of camp watchtowers. The enormous Hall of Witness is a sort of evil atrium with steel-braced brick walls reminiscent of crematoria. A staircase narrows unnaturally toward the top, crowding the visitors together, like a trick of perspective, like receding railroad tracks made abruptly real -- the Final Solution machine. Angles are skewed, expectations thwarted and sight lines intolerably torqued. No exit.

These touches (sometimes just barely) transcend mere surreal trickiness because of the truth they express. The real power of the museum is in its concrete narrative details, which gather themselves into an intense course in humanity and inhumanity. The place assumes no prior knowledge of the Holocaust and all that surrounded it, but through films, photographs, heartbreaking human artifacts and placard narratives it tells the story -- not only of Europe's Jews but also of the Gypsies, homosexuals and others the Nazis set about trying to annihilate.

Here is a tower gallery of Jewish life before the deluge in the Lithuanian town of Ejszyszki, presently to be extinguished -- picnics, children, a beautiful young woman, faces like quizzical flowers. Here is a railroad boxcar of the kind that carried people to Auschwitz. With one or two exceptions (such as a casting of the notorious iron ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign over the entrance to Auschwitz), nothing is simulated, every object is authentic, the real thing. Some of the film footage is grisly to the point of being unwatchable. Those images too disturbing for children are screened off to a height of five feet or so.

The best argument for the museum is this: It is a civilizing place that deepens the ideas of justice and humanity on which the U.S. depends. America needs its comprehensive moral ambition, the universal idea of itself as the last best hope. The country succeeds by renewing its idea of justice and by striving toward it. The Holocaust was a profound catastrophe of the civilized heart and of justice, and no one, including Americans, can be whole without trying to understand it.

Americans refused to take in the "Ship of Fools" in 1939, the liner St. Louis, even though it sailed as close as Havana with its 1,128 refugees fleeing Hitler. The American military in 1944 declined to bomb the death camps or the rail lines leading to them. These decisions (documented in the museum) have a contemporary resonance: bureaucratic cowardice and fecklessness, indifference, appeasement, denial, tribal intolerance and fanaticism, racial hatred. This is the way these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world at the end of the 20th century, geography matters less; borders are porous, ideas go at the speed of light. A European apocalypse is not alien to America. The lessons are here -- played out to an extreme that has become the world standard of evil, a sort of baseline.

The enslavement of blacks in America, an immense historical tragedy, was, however, different from the European Holocaust. Slavery did not threaten the extinction of black Africans; in biblical terms, it was more like the Egyptian captivity, not the apocalypse. But it is ridiculous to engage in a competition of comparative tragedies. A Museum of Black America in Washington is just as necessary, and would be just as civilizing, as the Holocaust museum.

The claim that the Holocaust never occurred has been spreading in America. The statement gets laundered, like dirty money, as it is passed along, especially to the young. A Midwestern mother, Jewish, hired a 15-year-old gentile girl to help with the children one summer. The mother had a number of books on her shelves about the Holocaust. The bright 16-year-old said one day, in a nice way, as if stating simple fact: "Why do you have so many books on that? It never happened, you know."

In the future such a girl's high school class might make a spring trip to Washington and visit the museum, and come away with a moral and political immunization that may be as useful, in the real world, as the Salk vaccine.