Suffer the children

A quick visit to the Museum of the Holocaust is too short. It is also too long, simply because the assault on the sense of right and wrong is overwhelming.

The Kilcullen group in the Holy Land had less than a couple of hours here at Yad Vashem, located a little way outside Jerusalem. Our guide Abie gave us a typically informative introduction. He also provided a personal angle, as his father was a Polish-born survivor of a Russian labour camp, after he'd 'escaped' from Poland in the early days of the pogrom.

He first brought us to the memorial for the one and a half million children who perished in what Fr Michael Murphy described as 'the most gruesome event ever'.

"The research which the Nazis did was extraordinary," Fr Michael said. "They had lists of Jews in every country, even of those living in Ireland."

Abie noted that the Nazis even had nurses and doctors whose work was to perfect killing systems, and to make them as cost efficient as possible.

He outlined too how the work to develop the 'master race' was also carefully planned and orchestrated, the object being to eliminate 'undesirables', among them those with disability or infirmity, Jews and gypsies. The plan even involved killing half of the population of Poland and using the other half as slaves.

Truth told, that's not the kind of detail I'd been aware of before, but the visit through the museum certainly reinforced that impression.

The photographs, anti-Jew posters, newspaper clippings and the newsreel footage of the event are truly horrifying. As is the documentation displayed that shows the meticulous detail with which the Nazis went about the business after they came to power in 1933.

But most of us in the group have seen similar images before. Shocking though they are, they don't surprise that much. Perhaps the 'new' genocides of the last decades, in Rwanda and more recently Darfur, not to mention what went on in The Balkans, may also have dulled our senses.

The real tough part had lasted just five minutes, before we entered the museum proper. The memorial to the murdered children begins with a walk down a pleasant stone alley, brightly lit by the sun and with the sculpted face of a child on the wall at the end before you turn into the display proper. The representation is the child of the couple who endowed the memorial, a son who was one of the slaughtered children.

The entrance to the interior is narrow, into an ante room with photographs on one wall of a dozen or so children, most smiling in what were clearly family portraits. The room narrows to a point where the throughway is just wide enough for one person, with a handrail to hold as you enter into sudden darkness.

Not quite totally dark. There are five lit candles, and through a complex set of mirrors and glass their light is reflected above, around and below, a virtual constellation of pinpoints in an otherwise black space.

It is actually physically unnerving. The handrail is necessary not just to guide through the exhibit, but to provide an anchor against potential vertigo.

The most terrible impact in the whole experience, however, comes from quiet voices. Taking turns to speak the name of a child, the child's age, and the country from where the child came before becoming a victim of the Third Reich.

Five minutes and we were back in sunlit garden. Some in the party sobbing openly, others clearly just holding back tears. I suspect there was none of us without at least a lump in the throat.

"The first thing you do when you want to annihilate a nation, is kill their children," Abie had said before we went in.

After that, the museum itself was actually less difficult in some ways. But then, we weren't Jews. And we were passing through quickly. Also, we Irish may have had our troubles, but since Cromwell nobody has tried genocide on us.

Reported from Jerusalem by the Accidental Pilgrim.