March 10



TEXAS:
Museum puts faces to millions killed in Holocaust


Holocaust survivor Max Glauben showed a picture of himself and his family
before World War II to Little Elm students Anastasia Seis and Victor
Rodriguez on Tuesday at the Holocaust museum. They crowd around a TV
tucked in the side of a railroad boxcar the kind used to haul millions of
Jews to the death camps and watched images flicker past to the sound of a
steam engine gathering speed.The man, gray from his years and the life
he's seen, stepped forward and pointed to a picture of a boy younger than
these seventh-graders.

"That's me," he said.

Max Glauben and 20 or so other World War II Holocaust survivors provide
the human faces to this terrible period of history for thousands of
students each year. They'll do the same beginning Sunday at the museum's
temporary home near The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

Though the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance
has hosted students at its new site for about a month, Sunday's grand
opening to the public brings a broadened focus and expanded hours,
executive director Elliott Dlin said.

IF YOU GO

What: The Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance

Where: 211 N. Record St., Suite 100

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday
and Sunday

Admission: $5 adults; $3 per person for students, senior citizens and
groups larger than 15

Telephone: 214-741-7500


Those changes come, not coincidentally, as the world prepares to mark the
60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in
Europe. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust.

Open house Sunday

Beginning with a private reception this evening, followed by Sunday's open
house, the museum hopes to raise its public profile and draw more visitors
to its powerful presentation of the Holocaust.

"We had an exhibit for 20 years at the Jewish Community Center" in North
Dallas, Mr. Dlin said, "but we were limited in our ability to serve the
community."

The new space at 211 N. Record St. is designed for better flow and larger
crowds.


Just 10 when the Warsaw Ghetto was created in 1940, Max Glauben (center,
middle row) smuggled rice, beans and sugar cubes to help his family
survive the Nazi regime.

"We're hoping to increase from 30,000 to 35,000 visitors a year at the old
place to 50,000, maybe 60,000 here," Mr. Dlin said.

Officials hope to build a permanent museum about a block from the
temporary site in the next four or five years.

While many come on school trips, Mr. Dlin hopes many more will be walk-ins
drawn by the museum or by its neighbors, most notably The Sixth Floor
Museum a block away.

"We're in one of the busiest parts of Dallas now," he said. "We're near
Dealey Plaza and The Sixth Floor Museum. The museum in Old Red [the old
county courthouse] opens this year. The Museum of Natural History will be
nearby, and the Dallas World Aquarium."

While the new floor plan will allow the museum to handle more visitors
each day, the size of the site limits the scope of the exhibit.

"We can't deal with everything related to the Holocaust in 1,600 square
feet," Mr. Dlin said. "The holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., has
40,000 feet, so we leave that sort of thing to them."

Instead, the Dallas exhibit focuses on the bystanders to the Holocaust,
beginning with a large photo taken immediately after the liberation of the
Buchenwald camp in 1945. American soldiers face a group of German
civilians, brought to the camp to show them what was done in their name: a
wagon stacked with emaciated corpses.

The museum visitor sees the same thing the German civilians saw, and
that's strictly intentional, Mr. Dlin said.

"We have to learn the lessons of the past to reshape the present and the
future," he said. "We look back to see how we should live now."


Human losses

To do that, the exhibit explores the tremendous human loss, with photos of
families before the war wedding pictures, bar mitzvah photos, smiling
faces. And then come depictions of life under the Nazis, when Germans
could expect to consume more than 2,500 calories of food a day, but Jews
less than 200.

One set of photos shows the groups of children that smuggled much of the
food into the Warsaw Ghetto, groups that included the young Max Glauben.

"We smuggled in rice, beans, things you could expand with water," Mr.
Glauben told the students from Little Elm. "We smuggled in sugar cubes,
because the sugar would keep you alive for a couple of days."

Just 10 when the Polish ghetto was created in 1940, Mr. Glauben, his
parents and his younger brother survived until they were taken to the
camps, where his mother and brother died. He and his father worked in the
labor camps, where his father died later.

But Mr. Glauben possessed an aptitude for making patterns for aircraft
parts, and that kept him alive, he said.

On April 16, 1945, with the Allied armies rolling into Germany, the Nazis
made one last push to exterminate the Jews. Mr. Glauben and others who'd
managed to avoid death for years were forced to the German death camp at
Dachau.

"By the time we were liberated by the U.S. Third Army, 179th Signal Corps,
there were fewer than 400 of us alive, out of 2,400," Mr. Glauben said.

The Army took him in to work with German and Polish prisoners, and in 1947
at 17 he came to the United States, settling in Dallas. He was drafted
into the Army during the Korean War, came back to Dallas and married a
local girl.

And for the rest of his life, he'd share his story, and the suffering of
his people.

"I feel responsible for doing this," he said, "for the ones who perished."

(source: Dallas Morning News)