Washington, D.C. (Special) -- Not only does the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum chronicle what happened during the Shoah. It also tells what didn't happen. 

Situated approximately halfway between the White House and the Capitol Building, the Holocaust Museum's exhibits include a pointed reminder to the U.S. government that when the nazis were slaughtering six million Jews along with five million other victims, for the most part the U.S. government was content to sit by and to allow it to happen.

"This is an American institution with an American point of view," says Mark Talisman, who was the founding vice chairman of the museum when it opened in April 1993. "No other country on earth that I am aware of would allow the kind of criticism that you see here about what we did not do to prevent the Holocaust from happening.  Because its exhibits hold up the question of America's indifference to the plight of the victims of the nazis, the Holocaust Museum has been a natural rallying place for those who called for intervention to stop mass killings in Rwanda earlier this decade and now in Kosovo, Talisman said.  The first exhibit that one sees, after taking an

Mark Talisman

elevator to the top floor to circle back down through the museum building, concerns the liberation of the camps by American soldiers -- the time when the awful dimensions of the Holocaust became starkly apparent. 

Then, the museum's exhibits flash back to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the increasing reign of terror that nazi Germany inflicted upon the Jews and other victims. 

But interspersed with this exhibitry are references, with documentation, to what was happening in the United States during these times.

"You will see the timeline of history and the history of anti-Semitism and so on, but you will also see sections on what America knew and when it knew it, and what it did about it, both officially and culturally-socially," Talisman said.  "We got the headlines of the front pages of newspapers from 1933 onwards and laminated them large in one whole room, so everyone will see precisely, how much was known. "  Talisman said he likes to research newspaper

Headlines trace what was known about Holocaust as it happened

stories from the Holocaust era. Recently, in San Diego, he said, he came across an article about how there was a campaign among some Jews to try to buy Baja California as a homeland for European Jews. 

In addition to the enlargements of newspaper pages, there are booths in which one may view other historical artifacts.

The exhibit is narrated by Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting System. "And then there is the whole section of what the American government did and didn't do," Talisman said. "This includes the horrible story of Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state, who was a childhood schoolmate of (U.S. President) Franklin Delano Roosevelt at St. Paul's in New Hampshire. He was in charge of the button that opened the gates (to immigration) or closed them, and he kept his finger on the button and he closed them." 

Eleanor Roosevelt, who had great sympathy for the plight of the Jews, twice tried to get her husband to fire Long, but "Franklin Roosevelt refused to fire his friend and right to the end he worked," Talisman said.

"We have his (Long's) diary here except for seven critical pages which the family sued to keep private, so we don't know those yet, but we know the rest of it, which is pretty horrible. So there are all those things to be seen." 

Talisman said the Holocaust Museum came into being after President Jimmy Carter and his family viewed in the White House residence Jerald Green's "Holocaust," a four day television mini-series in October of 1978. When the series ended, Carter asked his advisors what the American response should be, according to Talisman. 

While the series had its flaws, Talisman said, "it was the first time in my life, and a lot of other people's lives obviously, where they had actually thought about the Holocaust and concentrated on it because the series concentrated on one family--a doctor and his wife and two kids rather than a huge number of people." 

A paper was prepared by Carter's staff which recommended creation of a 60-member commission to answer the President's question about the American response. Elie Wiesel was appointed chairman, and Talisman, who had been active with both the Council of Jewish Federations and as a staff member for Congressman Charles Vanik of Ohio, was appointed vice chairman. 

The commission split over what the United States should do at that point in history -- some 33 years after the end of World War II. Historian Lucy Davidovich, author of the landmark Hitler's War Against the Jews, "was dead set against any monument, memorial, or anything like this being done in Washington or in the United States," Talisman recalled. 

"She kept saying 'it wasn't done here; it was done elsewhere. We weren't involved.' That crystallized my thinking strongly on the other side, and after a year, we were in the majority," Talisman said. 

"At the end, she conceded that maybe we should have a pile of stones with an eternal light somewhere down the street, but that was it. But we wanted a full blown memorial museum for lots of different reasons which are being demonstrated right now with Kosovo 

"There has to be a place that generates a pulse continuously about these kinds of issues," Talisman said. "I would like to say it is working but I can't. But at least it is here pulsing. And it is here equidistant from the White House and the Capitol, where policy was made." 

The commission recommended that a museum be designed, by another commission. Wiesel and Talisman again were appointed as chairman and vice chairman. 

"It was precisely because the United States was not involved in the Holocaust that we had to have this place -- to teach why we weren't involved" Talisman said. "Had we been involved, our borders would have been open and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe several million people could have been saved. 

"Because of our lead of closing our borders, effectively Canada took nobody, Australia took nobody, Britain took very few people, and people were just sealed to their death." 

A recent exhibit that opened in the Holocaust Museum looks in some depth at the story of the St. Louis, a ship laden with Jewish refugees which could not find a country willing to accept these passengers.  "That was one of some 80 ships that were turned back to death," Talisman said. "The present vice chairman of the museum, Ruth Mandel, was a three-year-old on that ship. She survived but most did not."  * * *  The site where the Holocaust Museum was built previously had three buildings upon it which were used

Exhibit panel on the St. Louis

for a variety of purposes, including a fish hatchery, a motor pool, and a nutrition station. 

Originally Talisman thought the group of three buildings could be renovated for use as the museum: "They were elongated buildings that were false Dutch colonial, mid 19th century buildings, that looked very much like the barracks at Auschwitz," he recalled. 

But after inspection the buildings had to be condemned, clearing the way for architect James Ingo Freed, whose family fled Germany in 1938, to design a 300,000 square foot museum. Freed visited Auschwitz and made sketches, which are reflected in the museum's unique design. 

The museum is built around a courtyard that evokes the train station at Auschwitz. "You go up to the fourth floor and work your way through the timeline of history, and you look out, and the illusion is one of the barracks at Auschwitz even though it is glass topped. 

"He twisted the metal and the glass; everything is very odd. You see I beams going nowhere against white marble, against brick, against sandstone, against black marble, against metal that is twisted," Talisman said. "What he did from the very beginning was to make the architecture and the building part of the exhibit of a world gone mad. 

"When you go to the top and you try to look out, every one of the major windows is blocked; your vision is blocked by something. In one place it is a list of all the first names of everyone who died (as they figured it by computer)." On another level of the building, "is a list of communities which died ... Where people will come literally to touch the name of their community, because it is the only tombstone there is -- the only remembrance in existence." 

In the middle of the museum is a shaft which visitors cross and recross at different levels. In this shaft are enlarged photographs of people who lived in just one town that was destroyed by the nazis -- the town of Eiszyszki, Lithuania, which had a pe-war population of 3,500 and a post Holocaust population of 29. Among the survivors was Yaffa Eliach, who later became a professor of Jewish studies at Brooklyn College. "She devoted all of her adult life to seeking every photograph of people who lived there," Talisman said. "It is three floors of pictures from everybody's family album." 

On once occasion, said Talisman, "a woman who is said to be 102-103 years old came in with three generations of her family and she got to that place, and she got herself up on two canes and she started looking at these pictures. She was thought to be in some stage of Alzheimer's, not responsive, not speaking anymore, glazed, but she got real close to some of the photographs, and she started identifying everyone of the people in the photographs. Her dentist, her first boyfriend, her second boyfriend, so and so forth. She said 'this is where I lived'; it was the first time anyone found out where she had lived." 

Talisman said incidents like that "happen every day here; it is astonishing the revelations." 

During the time the commission deliberated, it asked many people to participate in focus groups. After being told what would be in the museum, the people were asked if they would be likely to attend such a exhibition while visiting Washington. Talisman said the people all answered in the negative; there were too many uplifting things to see in Washington -- the monuments, the government buildings, the Smithsonian, to want to spend it in a place that sounded so depressing. 

Accordingly, the museum was designed to accommodate about 250,000 people a year. As it turned out, ten times as many people per year visit the museum. Timed entry tickets are necessary to prevent the flow of visitors from becoming so choked that no one can see the exhibits. Even so, there are bottlenecks through the museum building that someday will have to be renovated. 

A particular point of pride for the museum is its ability to trace the provenance of every single artifact on exhibit--regardless of whether it is as small as a lapel pin or as large as the railroad box car through which visitors pass on their journey through the museum. 

"The rule here is that everyone of these pieces has to have a minimum of two, if not three, letters of provenance, to demonstrate where each thing came from and its authenticity," Talisman said. 

Noting that there are already more than 100 academics who are denying or minimizing the Holocaust, Talisman said the careful documentation anticipates the time when there will be no living survivor, no eye witness, alive to refute the revisionists. 

"That means that nothing can be challengeable here; everything has to be mailed down completely in its authenticity," Talisman said.