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Understanding the Unthinkable
Horrors of Holocaust
Remembered in Skokie Facility
by Craig Barner
The $35 million Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center under construction in north suburban Skokie will try to understand the horror of six million Jews being murdered during the Holocaust in Europe as World War II raged.
The gravity of the subject will be underlined by the facility’s design, which evokes a rupture, says Richard Hirschhaut, project and executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, the Skokie-based organization overseeing the project.
An approximately 60-ft-long, ray-shaped section slices between two rectangular wings, one clad in dark-metal panels and the other wing in light-metal panels. At its end, the arc will be about 12 ft wide.
Seen from the adjacent Edens Expressway or head on, the space between the wings looks like a cut, gash or wound. As such, it is referred to as “the cleave.” The metaphor is reinforced by the jagged appearance of several ascending levels to be built within.
“The wound can never be healed,” adds the museum’s designer, Stanley Tigerman, principal architect with Chicago-based Tigerman McCurry Architects.
The Holocaust’s wounds are fresh in the memories of survivors and their descendents in Skokie and the Chicago metropolitan area, Hirschhaut says. For most of the last 60 years, Skokie has had the largest number of Holocaust survivors in the world outside of Israel.
Indeed, the HMFI’s president, Samuel Harris, a retired insurance executive, is himself a survivor. A native of Deblin, Poland, he was four years old when the Nazis invaded his country in 1939. His story is recounted in Sammy: Child Survivor of the Holocaust (Bluebird Publishing Inc., 1999).
“We took seriously that this is more than a museum,” Hirschhaut says. “If a person visited and felt very strongly and terribly about what had happened, that would be OK. But we wanted to take it to the next level and be able to draw from this experience specific, universal lessons.”
A goal is to assist in preventing genocide from happening again. Other mass killings, including those in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda, will be remembered, Hirschhaut says. A plan is also under way to make the facility a center of activism against the genocide occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa.
The building is expected to be dedicated Nov. 9, 2008, the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht or “night of broken glass.” The anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany and Austria caused thousands of Jewish homes and businesses to be ransacked during a night of violence.
About 250,000 visitors are expected annually at the 60,000-sq-ft museum, the biggest in the Midwest. Four major museums recounting the Holocaust are in other regions of the U.S.
An Inescapable Route
Visitors will take a harrowing trip through the building, and the one-way direction highlights the inescapable nature of the path that nearly all Jews faced.
“In a normal building, you enter and exit the same door, but in the Holocaust building, you enter one door and exit another,” Tigerman says. “Not a lot of buildings do that.”
The entry wing will be clad in dark-metal panels to reinforce the sense of malevolence and feature several key design elements. Gabled roofs will call to mind the horse barns that Jews were housed in some camps; windowless skylights will suggest factories and the industrial nature of the killing; a circular shape will call to mind a smokestack.
Once inside, the sense of dread will be reinforced.
Basically, Tigerman says, “You’re descending into hell.”
Exterior light will not penetrate because of the lack of windows. Ducts, conduit and piping will be exposed to reinforce the utilitarian feel of the camps. Passageways narrow, snake and slope as visitors move through the exhibit.
The exhibits will feature artifacts and text panels. Relics will include personal items, such as dolls, blankets and belts.
“One survivor is donating a bra she created in Auschwitz,” Hirschhaut says. “The artifact shows the degree to which people went to maintain dignity and humanity and resist the depravity.”
Also to be displayed will be previously unseen art made by inmates of the Theresienstadt, a concentration camp the Nazis maintained as a showplace for artists and intellectuals in what is now the Czech Republic. During the war, visitors, such as those with the Red Cross, were taken there to be shown a false image of the camps.
“They (inmates) were ordered to paint pastoral, beautiful scenes about how lovely life was, and they did that during the day,” Hirschhaut says. “At night, on the flip side of their pieces, they depicted the reality and what was really happening.”
As museum-goers wind their way through the wing, they will visit permanent exhibit areas that cover topics that include pre-war Jewish life; the rise of Nazism; Kristallnacht; ghettoization; and the Wannsee Conference in suburban Berlin, where Nazi officials met to determine the “final solution to the Jewish question.”
A Grim Artifact
Visitors will come to the lowest level—literally and figuratively—in an unlit, cylindrical space often referred to as the hinge. Detailing the deportation of the Jews, it features video of concentration campus.
Deception is a major theme here because Jews had been led to believe that they would be safe under the Nazis. “The Germans used language to deceive, and that deception leads to the darkest part of this thing,” Tigerman adds.
The most significant artifact is up a ramp, an early-20th-Century German rail car of the type used to transport millions of Jews to concentration camps. Visitors will have the option to walk through it or go around.
A 70-ton crane was used to set the red-slatted car in place, says Patrick O’Bryan, senior project manager with Chicago-based Bulley & Andrews LLC, the contractor.
“Rather than risk the integrity of the car and roll it into place—it’s been exposed for years—we braced it, shored it and craned into place from the street,” he adds.
Liberation
After the rail car, visitors will enter the light wing. It’s there that passageways gradually rise, and the lighting level increases.
Exhibits will detail topics that include the world response, rescuers, liberation, displaced persons camps and renewal.
A Multifaceted Meaning
The design of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is layered with multiple levels of meaning meant to reflect the richness and span of Jewish thought and history.
“I was trying to reach people in any way I know how,” says Stanley Tigerman, project architect and principal of Chicago-based Tigerman McCurry Architects, the designer.
For instance, an arced section between two horizontal wings is intended to represent a rupture, says Richard Hirschhaut, executive director of the Skokie-based Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois.
Beyond being a symbol of the calamity, “the cleave,” as it is known, was positioned to relate it to Jewish history. It forms a 5.9-degree angle between the light wing on the north and the dark wing on the south.
The angle is important. The light wing faces due east, which for the ancient Jews meant light, life and the anticipation of a messianic age. The dark wing is oriented southeast toward Jerusalem, the scene of another rupture.
The ancient city was the location of the temple of Solomon—the center for centuries of Jewish faith—until it was destroyed in 587 BCE during a Babylonian invasion. The Jews were deported from Jerusalem but allowed to return generations later. Nevertheless, they endured centuries of invasions, including by Greeks and Romans, after their return.
“After the time of Jesus and after the Diaspora, when the Jews were spread about the land, instead of their orientation being east, they began to vest their faith in the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” Tigerman says. “So those two orientations gave birth to what you see.”
The design suggests other religious elements, such as two columns near the entrance. They evoke Yachin and Boaz, the columns framing the temple.
“They’re the exact diameter, exact height, exact intercolumnation as the two columns from that temple,” Tigerman says.
But they are skeletal in part as a reminder that the Nazis were trying to extinguish Jewish culture, he adds.
Lurianic Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism originating in Europe in the 16th Century, also plays a part in the design. Three parts make up the system of mystical thought to explain Jewish history —tzimtzum or “contraction” for the divine being retreating from the scene; shvirat hakelim or “breaking of the vessels” for the jarring of things; and tikkun or “repairing” for synthesis.
Three parts of museum—the dark and light wings and the cleave—mirror this. Also the building has three primary functions as a museum, memorial and education center.
Seen from the sky, the building will call to mind a Toranic scroll.
“If you look at the Torah, it’s parchment between two scrolls,” Tigerman says. “You read it by unrolling one scroll.” |
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A catwalk will ascend to a Hall of Reflection, where visitors might engage in contemplation.
Down a hallway from it is a cylindrical room holding a book of memory with names of Holocaust victims obtained from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The 32-ft-high wall will have the etched first names of victims and an eternal flame. On the cylinder’s roof, six sticks will represent the six million.
Also in the facility will be an exhibit on Anne Frank, the Amsterdam girl whose diary, written while in hiding with her family and others, has given a face to the Holocaust for generations since.
Video will be displayed from Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. After making “Schindler’s List,” the filmmaker recorded the testimonies of survivors.
Electronic needs are only one element of the building’s complex mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, O’Bryan says.
“We’ve had about 20 MEP coordination meetings already and we haven’t started [those systems],” he adds.
Other facilities include a 260-seat lecture hall, library, classroom, temporary exhibit space and offices.
Like the dark wing, some exterior details will stand out on the light wing to highlight the metaphor of righteousness and cleanness. For instance, the exterior metal panels are welded, rather than being detailed mechanically with nuts and bolts, as on the dark wing. The door is frame by a bowspring truss, rather than a gable, like on the dark wing.
Speed is of the essence so the facility can be toured by as many Holocaust survivors as possible.
“It’s a difficult building to push schedule-wise,” Bulley’s O’Bryan says. “Everything is thought out. Every joint, every line aligns with something else.”
Mason crews have been doubled, and work is being done on Saturdays to accelerate progress.
Among the last things visitors will see as they depart will be the Fountain Honoring the Righteous outside. It will list 36 names of those who saved Jews, including Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved 15,000 lives, and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved 1,200. Elements will include landscaping and benches for peaceful contemplation, in addition to running water.
“About one-half of 1% of the population of Europe at the time said no and at great risk to their lives and those of their families, they shielded Jews from certain death,” Hirschhaut says. “We want to try to identify and hold up those actions as an extraordinary example of courage.”
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