New Holocaust museum aims to preserve the past

Holocaust survivor Samuel Harris of Kildeer stands by the type of German rail car that transported him to a Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He's president of the nearly completed Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie.

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, his vision for the Midwest's premier Holocaust museum is about to be realized.

"It's sad, but I'm the victor, aren't I? They tried to kill me, and here we are building a museum showing how evil they were," the Kildeer resident said Tuesday.

Harris, 73, joined local survivors and officials on Veterans Day to announce that the new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center will open in Skokie on April 19, 2009. Its mission is to preserve the memories of the 6 million lives lost and teach current generations about their role in combating intolerance and genocide today.

Now the museum board president, Harris was 9 when the Russians liberated him and two of his sisters from Czenstochowa.

"We always dreamed reaching more people to ensure future generations would be able to continue to hear our stories and learn from our experiences so that 'never again' would truly be a reality," he said.

Architect Stanley Tigerman designed the 65,000-square-foot museum at 9603 Woods Drive. Housed in a small nearby storefront since 1981, the museum was founded in response to a proposed neo-Nazi march in Skokie.

Visitors will walk through the story of the Holocaust, said interior and exhibit co-designer Michael Berenbaum, former project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

One particularly powerful room in the permanent exhibition will lead people through the dark as survivors describe their deportation to labor and concentration camps. Visitors will emerge into that world and see a German rail car of the type used by Nazis to transport victims.

Other artifacts include Simon Wiesenthal's desk and glasses, the original volume of the Nuremberg Trial transcripts and a Kindertransport list of children sent to London from Danzig, Poland, to escape the occupation.

Capital campaign chair J.B. Pritzker said the museum has raised $36.5 million of its $45 million fundraising goal and received state grants in excess of $6 million. The museum is expected to host 250,000 students each year from across the Midwest and Illinois, which mandates curriculum on the Holocaust and other genocides.

There's also a youth exhibit for 9- to 11-year-olds, an art gallery, classrooms and auditorium. Nearly 2,000 testimonies of Midwest survivors will be accessible through a library and resource center.

It's likely the last major center built in collaboration with survivors such as Buffalo Grove resident Fritzie Fritzshall, who was brought to Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia. She thinks it's important that the museum will take a global perspective to explore genocide beyond what took place in Nazi Germany.

"The world has not learned from the past. It has not learned from the Holocaust," said Fritzshall, board vice president. "We're trying to show what's still happening so we can teach our young and all live in peace."