Holocaust Museum In Washington
Weinberg is the founding director of the museum, responsible for its planning phase and the first stages of its operation. Elieli is a consultant to Weinberg who participated in the museum's development. The authors give a brief history of the museum's creation (opened in April 1993 and visited by 5,000 people a day) and describe its architecture and exhibits in words and photographs. They discuss the planning team's commitment to historical truth in order to give the exhibits the highest degree of authenticity. There are hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs throughout the book--photos of kitchen utensils, hair, shoes, forged documents, artificial limbs, and luggage and prayer shawls confiscated from the victims. Haunting and terrifying are photos showing charred corpses of concentration camp inmates, a starved prisoner in Buchenwald, a young Jewish partisan woman being hanged in Minsk in 1941, Danish Jews escaping to Sweden on a small boat, and Hungarian Jews arriving in Auschwitz in 1944. The book provides a well-rounded history of every aspect of the Holocaust, a chilling representation of the museum itself.George Cohen