Images of anguish

Preeti Verma Lal

In Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem (Holocaust History Museum) live memories. Morbid memories. Of hatred and hunger. Of concentration camps and barbed fences. Of persecution and Nazi propaganda against Jews during the Holocaust era. Of death and annihilation. This prism-like structure designed by architect Moshe Safdie, Yad Vashem documents the anguish of six million Jews killed by Hitler and his collaborators. The Museum’s Archives, the largest and most comprehensive repository of its kind, contains 179 million pages of Holocaust documentation. The Hall of Names displays 600 photographs and houses the most extensive collection of Pages of Testimony (short biographies of each Holocaust victim). More than 2 million Pages are stored in the circular repository around the outer edge of the Hall, with room for six million in all. Under its Gathering the Fragments campaign, Yad Vashem rescued 40,000 items (documents, diaries, photographs, artefacts and artworks) from the Holocaust era. Since the project was launched in 2011, more than 1,44,000 Holocaust items have been received from 7,000 individuals. Yad Vashem lives the Holocaust even 70 years after it ended. 

The entire structure of the museum — floors, wall, interior and exterior — are reinforced concrete. The 180-metre-long linear structure brings in daylight from above through a 200-metre-long glass skylight. The play of dark and light, spaces with varying heights and different degrees of light add to the unfolding of a narrative as if one were descending deep into the mountain. Along the long walkway are the 10 galleries that chronologically narrate the Holocaust story — each section deliberating on one aspect of the Holocaust: The World That Was; From Equals to Outcasts; The Awful Beginning; Between Walls and Fences; Mass Murder; The Final Solution; Resistance and Rescue; The Last Jews; Return to Life; Facing the Loss.

Step in and the first thing on display are bundled books that were destroyed by the Nazis. In galleries, photographs stare from the wall. Shoes of Holocaust victims are piled under hardened glass. In another corner, lie countless menorahs taken from Jewish families. Dolls that children carried when they were being deported. Striped uniforms of men in Nazi concentration camps. A comb made of nails. In one video, Hitler is haranguing over the importance of ‘extermination of Jews’. In another video, a skeletal child is standing in front of a bakery. Hungry. Longing for a piece of bread. Images of Jewish men, women and children herded to be deported. The media as a tool for Nazi propaganda. So many images and artefacts that tug at the heart. 

Not everything, however, is funereal in Yad Vashem. In the Avenue of the Righteous, trees have been planted to honour those who risked their lives to save the Jews. There’s one carob tree for Oskar and Emile Schindler, who saved more than 1,200 Jews. Under the shade of that tree in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, belief in goodness and courage returns. You know life cannot be ugly always. Hatred cannot be triumphant always. The sun shines even on the grimmest day. Life returns.