Archive for April, 2009

The new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois opened today. I won a ticket lottery for the chance to witness their opening ceremonies. I was really happy to be a part of the dedication ceremony and in the last few days I read up on the Skokie museum in preparation for today. Through online print and speeches given today, I learned that Skokie had one of the highest populations of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. Survivors settled in Skokie for many reasons – affordable, quiet suburbs with good schools, but most importantly, they were surrounded by people like themselves. One survivor said that she had no family left. In Skokie, she at least had people who understood her. Together, she was not alone. Think about that for a moment.

Today’s ceremony was awash with big headliner names. President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and the President of Israel spoke via satellite and President Clinton headlined the event giving a speech about genocide – with particular focus on the Holocaust, Rwanda, and the Balkans.

Despite the impressive ranks of the aforementioned speakers, the speakers who impacted me the most were the survivors themselves. They put a living face to the stories of millions of dead. One of the speakers was part of the initial group who conceived of the Holocaust Museum idea. Relocating to Skokie after the war, this gentleman became very involved with other survivors in his area. He and his contemporaries started to talk about their experiences and teach others about the Holocaust. Through their stories and teachings, these survivors touched other community members and a core group of dedicated people emerged to share survivors’ stories with a greater audience. Through the efforts of this devoted group, the Museum project came to life. This particular speaker’s name escapes me, as I have now lost the program, but his message was strangely positive for such a somber day. He was almost so positive that it seemed out of place. After thinking about this, I realized that today’s museum opening is quite a positive thing to be celebrating. The subject matter is of course hard to comprehend from a humanity standpoint, but the chance for these survivors to be heard and to educate others is such a gift. This is probably why the latter, but prominent half of the Museum’s name is “Education Center”.

And education and knowledge are key. The second speaker that impacted me, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, spoke of his time in a concentration camp. He said the Holocaust started to boil over into his native Hungary quite late in the war, but that Hungarians had been left in the dark about the “final solution”. It was 1944 that Nazis entered his village and started to deport Jews. He said had they known the fate that would await them at the concentration camps, these Hungarian Jews would have fled. Elie Wiesel repeated, had they known, they would have left. He scolded the Western media, in particular the New York Times, for putting reports of concentration death camps on inner pages of their newspapers and not the front cover. Had they taken the camps as seriously as they should have at the time, the New York Times could have influenced other media and the word could have gotten out to a lot more people and perhaps saved more lives. The Hungarian townspeople simply did not know. This makes me feel horrible about the lack of media coverage in other genocides or mass killings – namely Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur.

Information is so powerful – and in Dr. Wiesel’s and other Holocaust victims and survivors’ cases, a matter of life and death. Given the age of most of the survivors, time has become a pressing issue in terms of sharing information about the Holocaust. What is special about this museum is that we thankfully can dedicate it during the lifetimes of survivors, but as the Holocaust falls father into our history and we lose survivors to old age, their stories are lost with them. Now is the time to get involved if you care to learn about, understand, and stand up against these types of atrocities. I strongly recommend you visit the Museum and meet survivors in the Education Center while you can.