Off the Beaten Track in Israel - The Children’s Holocaust Museum
- Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot
by Michael Rosenbloom(spidermr@aol.com)
Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, situated on the coast road between Acco and Naharia, was founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. This gives the kibbutz a special perspective for things holocaust-related. Adjacent to the kibbutz, lie the remains of an ancient Roman aqueduct, and inside the kibbutz are a pair of holocaust museums. One is a museum about the Jewish Resistance in Europe. The other focuses on the Holocaust through the eyes of children. This article is about the children’s museum.
The museum is built in the shape of a cylinder. You enter from the top and gradually descend in a circular fashion stopping at ten stations. Each station has speakers in the ceiling from which are heard authentic narratives of various children, as they trace the transformation of their lives from those of normal happy-go-lucky children to ones of restriction, and later to lives of utter peril and desperate attempts at survival.
Each station is designed with a specific backdrop: as a ghetto with photographs of street scenes outside house windows, or a station with railroad tracks and ties, as a forest, or a concentration camp barracks. The stations focusing on the ghetto are most convincing. All the stations are dark and dreary, except for the first one, which represents life before the Holocaust.
Various television monitors are located in certain corners, apart from the stations. Short five to ten minute narratives are shown on these television screens in which survivors tell the story of their experiences as children during the war as well as the different means by which they survived: by their parents putting one in a convent, one with a Polish farmer, being picked up by the Partisans and more. I found myself riveted to the monitors as these moving stories of the survivors unfolded.
The one complaint I have is that the quality of the audio (with the exception of the television monitors) is not very good. Neither the Hebrew emanating from the various ceiling speakers nor the English in the telephone-like gadget, for English-speaking visitors, was of a sufficiently clear quality. Sometimes it was difficult hearing or understanding the story being told at a particular station.
Nevertheless, the museum is a must-see, particularly for families with children. The museum presents the subject of the Holocaust in an age-sensitive way and makes it approachable to children, even small children. That’s no small feat!
March 2000
Next article: Mitzpe Golani (Tel Faher)
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