Illinois Holocaust Museum opens from Daily Northwestern on Vimeo.Video by Brian Rosenthal
SKOKIE – More than 60 years later, Holocaust survivor Fritzie Fritzshall can still smell the railcar that transported her and her family to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“We can still hear the wheels turning on the track for the railroad car,” she said. “The sounds and the smells stay with us probably forever.”
Fritzshall, along with hundreds of other survivors, staff members and volunteers, has spent the last decade working toward a goal that was achieved Sunday – the grand opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
The 65,000-square foot museum features an exhibit taking people through the story of the Holocaust, an interactive exhibit for children, and a series of art exhibits featuring art related to genocide and human cruelty.
The opening, held in a tent near the museum building, 9603 Woods Drive in Skokie, featured several famous speakers including President Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of “Night.”
An estimated 12,000 people filed into the tent on the rainy afternoon, braving the chilly spring weather to sit outside and listen to the speakers.
After thanking the museum board and staff, Clinton commented on the center’s goal.
“It strikes me as not only appropriate but necessary that it is a place of both remembrance and education,” he said. “Because both are necessary to truly say ‘never again.'”
Photos by Alexandra Finkel Skokie has hosted a smaller Holocaust museum since 1981, when The Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois opened it as a response to the attempted march of a neo-Nazi group in the late 1970s.
These events, museum staff said, caused the Holocaust survivor population of Skokie to realize they had to share their stories.
“It became an issue that united the community of Skokie, and most importantly, it united the thousands of Holocaust survivors living in Skokie,” said Lillian Polus Gerstener, the museum’s director of special projects.
In addition to discussing his experiences in the Holocaust and the years since, Wiesel spent a significant portion of his speech discussing the importance of cooperation among all the world’s peoples.
“We must learn now certain very simple lessons,” he said. “That whatever happens to one community affects all communities.”
In a video shown to the audience, President Barack Obama echoed Wiesel’s feelings.
“We each have a responsibility to stand up for our fellow human beings,” he said. “That’s the lesson that schoolchildren will learn when they walk through the museum.”
Klaus Scharioth, the German ambassador to the United States, also spoke.
After receiving a rousing ovation for his role in helping Holocaust survivors determine the fate of their families, Scharioth directly addressed his country’s role in the genocide.
“As a German and as the German ambassador to the United States, I stand here with a heavy heart,” he said. “(The Holocaust) is certainly the most shameful period in German history.”
Scharioth also mentioned 10 young Germans who spent a year working with the Holocaust Memorial Foundation on the museum, saying they had become very close with the survivors who worked with them. This, he said, was a sign of reconciliation.
Clinton focused most of his speech not on the genocide of Jews but about the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo that occurred during his terms as president.
Both Wiesel and the former president mentioned that it was Wiesel who implored Clinton to intervene in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
“We did, but only after 250,000 more had died,” Clinton said. “We acted much more quickly in Kosovo, but far too late in Rwanda, where 10 percent of the population died, mostly by machete, in just 90 days.”
Clinton went on to tell several personal stories about how healing had occurred in Rwanda.
He described one woman of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, who had seven of her 10 children killed by members of the Hutu majority. In the years since the genocide, she has run a basket-weaving cooperative in Rwanda. Clinton said that one day, a Hutu member of her collective confessed to having killed one of her sons and told her that if she wished, he would wait for her to summon one of her remaining sons to kill him.
“This woman looked at him and said ‘What good would that do?'” Clinton said. “‘I forgive you. Get up and go back to work.”‘
For the survivors who helped create this museum, the presence of the building is something to be truly thankful for.
“It means a dream come true and some more,” said Barbara Steiner, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. “Even in my dreams I couldn’t imagine this would be here.”
