Holocaust museum seeks to inspire

June 23, 2006
Daily Herald
BY TARA MALONE Staff Writer

Ida Paluch was a young girl when an aunt hoisted her across the barbed wire, saving her from the fate awaiting most Jews corralled together in a southern Polish city.

It was 1942.

Paluch never again saw her aunt, one of an estimated 6 million people killed during the Holocaust.

Three decades later, Cambodia's Pol Pot regime drove Samorn Nil from his family, forcing him to work in the countryside. Nil lost his father, siblings and 1.7 million countrymen to Cambodia's killing fields.

Kenneth Elisapana escaped the violence that gripped Sudan, dividing the Islamic north from the non-Muslim south, violence that has killed more than 2æmillion Sudanese since 1983. The current conflict in western Sudan's Darfur region claimed an additional 250,000 lives.

All witnessed violence at its worst.

All say we have not heeded its lessons.

"People didn't learn a thing," said Paluch, a 67-year-old Skokie woman. "I always wonder what is the future of this world going to be."

Elisapana echoed the concern.

"After the Second World War, we formed the United Nations and we said, 'Never again.' But today still, regimes continue to kill and rape," said Elisapana, 38, who works at World Relief in Aurora.

Amid this legacy of violence and indecision comes the new $30 million, 64,000-square-foot Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

The suburban center is the latest memorial intended to remember the past and forge a more peaceful future, organizers say. The Skokie-based center joins others in Washington D.C., New York, Houston and Los Angeles.

Holocaust museums are not alone in this mission.

Across the Chicago area and the country, museums remembering those lost to atrocities in Armenia, Cambodia and Bosnia are taking root. This, coupled with more states requiring such history be taught in public schools, fuels hope that knowledge of past mistakes avoids future ones.

"That lesson has not sunk in yet in terms of the global stage," said Brett Kaplan, a Holocaust scholar with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The undying hope is people can learn how to prevent genocide in the future."

Illinois is one of 16 states with laws concerning Holocaust education.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich last year broadened the state's long-standing Holocaust education mandate to include lessons from Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.

More than 250,000 visitors are expected each year when the museum opens in 2008.

"We will hopefully create a generation of activists," said Richard Hirschhaut, executive director of the Skokie-based Holocaust center. "We will awaken the sense of responsibility within young people to raise their voices and act when they see hate, when they see intolerance at its earliest stages."

Joining them in the task are organizers of Chicago's Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial.

Run by the Cambodian Association of Illinois, the center is one of the country's only public memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge. An estimated 2,000 people visited last year.

"The suffering is not just for Cambodian people alone. We live in the same planet. The suffering of a person is also the suffering of all of us," said Nil, 52, who directs social services for the Cambodian group.

"That it still continues to happen ... it's shameful," Nil said.

The burden of action weighs heaviest over western Sudan, many say.

Since fighting erupted in 2003, more than 2 million people have been driven from their homes.

The Illinois Museum and Education Center Web site calls on visitors to urge legislators to press for intervention. Paluch and others in the Holocaust Association for Child Survivors routinely send letters.

Through his work with World Relief, Elisapana does the same. The groundbreaking Thursday for the new Holocaust center underscores the need, he said.

"This is the past we are breaking ground on, but there is a current genocide in Sudan. Are we going to wait and break ground for that history?" Elisapana asked.

Gitta Jaskulski puts her faith in talking.

The 63-year-old Des Plaines woman survived nearly two years in the Theresienstadt concentration camp as a toddler. Fewer than 100 children of the 15,000 held in the camp lived, estimates show.

"It's just so important to tell our story," Jaskulski said. "It's not just something in the history books."

tmalone@dailyherald.com

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