Israel: A new Holocaust museum, designed to affirm Israel's claim to be the principal keeper and interpreter of survivors' memories, opened in Jerusalem yesterday.
Fifteen presidents and prime ministers, many from the east European nations most affected by the genocide of the Jews, joined survivors at the dedication of the stark prism-shaped concrete structure cutting through the Mount of Remembrance.
Israel's president Moshe Katsav said that the museum would "serve as an important signpost to all of humankind, a signpost that warns how short the distance is between hatred and murder, between racism and genocide".
The museum, located at the Yad Vashem memorial, puts a new emphasis on preserving the memories of the rapidly diminishing number of living Holocaust survivors.
"Our generation is the last generation," said Mr Katsav. "History asks the survivors to draw out of the deep recesses of their minds the memories of what has happened for the benefit of future generations, for the benefit of mankind."
The exhibition for the first time also acknowledges other victims of the Nazis, such as gypsies and homosexuals, who were ignored in the old museum, established in 1957.
Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, told those assembled that the Holocaust was not about man's inhumanity to man, but about man's inhumanity to Jews.
Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon said that the museum was a testament to the need for Israel to exist.
"There are several chambers in the heart of man. In the national Jewish heart, there is a chamber of memory, and it is here at Yad Vashem," Mr Sharon said. "The state of Israel is the only place in the world where Jews have the right and the strength to defend themselves by themselves. It is the only guarantee that the Jewish people will never again know a Holocaust. It is our historic commitment to the Jewish people."
Representatives from some 40 countries attended the ceremony, including UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski
"The Holocaust was not just a Jewish experience. It is an experience of great importance to the whole world," Mr Annan told the gathering. "We have all drawn the lessons from it."
Funded by Israel and the Jewish community abroad, the $56 million museum seeks to portray the Holocaust on a more personal level through displays of the artefacts, diaries and photographs of victims and their Nazi persecutors. "We gave the victims an identity. We gave them a voice. We gave them a face," said curator Yehudit Inbar. "We did the same thing to the Nazis . . . For each one we showed who they were - that they were not monsters, but people who did monstrous things."
The idea of collecting survivors' stories came when an elderly survivor brought Mr Inbar crumbling spectacles her mother had given her on their arrival at Auschwitz death camp just before the mother was sent to the gas chamber.
Two braids of hair which a mother cut from the head of her 11-year-old daughter before the girl was deported from Germany to her death are also on display beside her photograph. The hair, given to non-Jewish neighbours for safekeeping, was recovered after the war by the girl's brother.