Light & sound to recreate Nazi horrors
YAD MORDECHAI (Israel): Survivors of one the darkest episodes of the Nazi era have turned to light-and-sound shows and walk-through mockups in the hope their memories will not fade away into the history books.
At the "From Holocaust to Revival" museum in southern Israel, a scale model of the Warsaw ghetto shows where its Jews rose up against Hitler's troops in mid-1943, engaging in frantic house-to-house fighting in a bid to halt deportations to death camps.
The revolt marked the only significant armed Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II, but it was crushed with the loss of several thousand Jewish lives. Many of the Ghetto's remaining 50,000 plus inhabitants were sent to the gas chambers, becoming part of the 6 million killed by the Nazis.
Guided by veterans of the revolt, visitors can pace out a reconstructed bunker and pack into a railway car recalling those that hauled Jews to death camps. Such passing impressions of the Holocaust have stirred concern in at least one commentator, who wondered in the Haaretz newspaper whether the "Disneyland approach" was too trivial.
Warsaw ghetto survivor Aliza Melamed said displays of the kind at the museum in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai were necessary to appeal to those for whom the horrors were not a living memory.
At the "From Holocaust to Revival" museum in southern Israel, a scale model of the Warsaw ghetto shows where its Jews rose up against Hitler's troops in mid-1943, engaging in frantic house-to-house fighting in a bid to halt deportations to death camps.
The revolt marked the only significant armed Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II, but it was crushed with the loss of several thousand Jewish lives. Many of the Ghetto's remaining 50,000 plus inhabitants were sent to the gas chambers, becoming part of the 6 million killed by the Nazis.
Guided by veterans of the revolt, visitors can pace out a reconstructed bunker and pack into a railway car recalling those that hauled Jews to death camps. Such passing impressions of the Holocaust have stirred concern in at least one commentator, who wondered in the Haaretz newspaper whether the "Disneyland approach" was too trivial.
Warsaw ghetto survivor Aliza Melamed said displays of the kind at the museum in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai were necessary to appeal to those for whom the horrors were not a living memory.
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