World leaders open Israel Holocaust museum

JERUSALEM - World leaders inaugurated a museum at Israel's Holocaust memorial today in a show of international determination to keep alive the memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and prevent future genocide.

"The Holocaust was not just a Jewish experience. It is an experience of great importance to the whole world," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who attended the ceremony at the Yad Vashem memorial with 40 foreign leaders and dignitaries.

"We have all drawn the lessons from it," he said.

The Ghanaian statesman's wife is the niece of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews in Hungary during World War Two.

Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet troops who liberated Budapest and was never heard of again.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski were among those in Jerusalem to dedicate the museum designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie.

Funded by Israel and the Jewish community abroad, the $56 million project seeks to portray the Holocaust on a more personal level through displays of the artefacts, diaries and photographs of victims and Nazi persecutors.

Yad Vashem's old museum, on a pine tree-covered Jerusalem hilltop, had been overshadowed in recent years by more innovative museums abroad dedicated to the Holocaust.

"We gave the victims an identity. We gave them a voice. We gave them a face," said curator Yehudit Inbar.

"We did the same thing to the Nazis ... For each one we showed who they were -- that they were not monsters but people who did monstrous things. "

The idea of collecting survivors' stories came when an elderly survivor brought Inbar crumbling spectacles her mother had given her on their arrival at Auschwitz death camp just before the mother was sent to the gas chamber.

Two braids of hair which a mother cut from the head of her 11-year-old daughter before the girl was deported from Germany to her death are also on display beside her photograph.

The hair, given to non-Jewish neighbours for safekeeping, was recovered after the war by the girl's brother.

Yad Vashem made the museum project a priority as the number of now elderly Holocaust survivors diminishes.

The museum's philosophy is encapsulated by its Hall of Names in which the names and some of the photographs of three million of the Jewish dead surround a watery abyss.

Yad Vashem recently set up an internet site where the personal histories of three million Jewish victims can be found.

- REUTERS