Video: 'United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opening ceremony, April 23rd, 1993'
(Thursday, April 22, 1993, the ceremony began at approximately 11:00 a.m. EST; President Clinton spoke at 12:43 p.m. EST) — Nearly 50 years after the furnaces of Nazi Germany devoured their last victims, survivors, and world leaders gathered beneath a bleak, disconsolate sky today to dedicate a museum chronicling man’s descent into darkness and the indifference to the evil that marked the era.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was hailed not as the triumph of the human spirit over brutality or survival over genocide, but as a debt to the dead, a warning to future generations of the cost of detachment.
From the somber testimony of Elie Wiesel, who spoke of his mother’s murder at Auschwitz, to 68-year-old Marcia Krause, who wandered in the rain amid the 8,000 guests with a sign hanging from her neck bearing her maiden name and hometown in Poland in a futile search for family members, today’s ceremony seemed dedicated to the enduring wounds of the survivors.
“The Holocaust reminds us forever that knowledge divorced from values can only serve to deepen the human nightmare, that a head without a heart is not humanity,” President Clinton said. He hailed Allied soldiers, resistance fighters, and private people who “manned the thin line of righteousness, who risked and lost their lives to save others.”
The museum, built with private contributions on federally donated land, stands near the Mall, not far from the Washington Monument. Unlike the other national museums in the capital, it does not celebrate history or technology but stands as a stark, sober reminder of their perils.
Video: 'United States Holocaust Memorial Museum'
“To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time,” Wiesel said. “We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to be killed again.”
The museum opens as Holocaust survivors enter their final years. Many are troubled by a recent survey indicating a majority of high school students know of the Holocaust only as a chapter of death and tragedy, not necessarily tied to Jews, Nazis, or Hitler.
Wiesel denounced the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, which he said demanded an American response.
“We cannot tolerate the excruciating sights of this old new war,” Wiesel said, turning to Clinton. “Mr. President, this bloodshed must be stopped. It will not stop unless we stop it.”
Clinton also spoke of ethnic cleansing but did not address Wiesel’s appeal. Instead, he spoke of brutality around the globe.
“We learn again and again that the world has yet to run its course of animosity and violence,” Clinton said. “Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia is but the most brutal and blatant and ever-present manifestation of what we see also with the oppression of the Kurds in Iraq, the abusive treatment of the Baha’i in Iran, the endless race-based violence in South Africa.”
President Chaim Herzog of Israel, who recalled his horror upon discovering Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps as a soldier in the British Army, said, “Nobody who saw those terrifying scenes will ever forget.”
Video: 'A visit to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.'
And the television journalist Ted Koppel, whose parents were refugees from the Holocaust, read Edward R. Murrow’s famous 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald: “There surged around me an evil-smelling horde. Men and boys reached out to touch me; they were in rags and the remnants of uniform. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes.”
“In another part of the camp, they showed me the children, hundreds of them,” he continued. “Some were only 6. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. D-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers; they will carry them till they die.”
Koppel spoke on a dais on which was written the words of Wiesel that have become the museum’s motto: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
Since its dedication, the museum has had nearly 40 million visitors, including more than 10 million school children, 99 heads of state, and more than 3,500 foreign officials from over 211 countries and territories. The museum’s visitors came from all over the world, and less than 10 percent of the museum’s visitors are Jewish.
The USHMM’s collections contain more than 12,750 artifacts, 49 million pages of archival documents, 85,000 historical photographs, a list of over 200,000 registered survivors and their families, 1,000 hours of archival footage, 93,000 library items, and 9,000 oral history testimonies. It also has teacher fellows in every state in the United States and, since 1994, almost 400 university fellows from 26 countries.
Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have documented 42,500 ghettos and concentration camps created by the Nazis throughout German-controlled areas of Europe from 1933 to 1945.
