A new museum will open in 2008 in the heart of Warsaw's wartime
ghetto to tell the story of Europe's largest Jewish community
before it was wiped out by the Nazis, the project's director said
on Monday.?
After a 10-year struggle for funding, Poland's government and
Jewish groups agreed to build the US$30-million museum in a square
next to the Warsaw Ghetto memorial.
It will trace several centuries of Jewish history in Poland and
pay homage to famous Polish-born Jews including director Roman
Polanski, film producer Samuel Goldwyn and Israel's first prime
minister, David Ben Gurion.
The building, designed by little-known Finnish architects Ilmari
Lahdelma and Rainer Mahlamaki, will have an austere blue-glass
exterior encasing a red, cave-like structure meant to symbolize
Moses' parting of the Red Sea.
"Many of the designs were spectacular from the outside, but we
also wanted something that had a magical interior," said project
director and historian Jerzy Halbersztadt.
"This design is open, it draws people in."
Twelve years after Steven Spielberg's Holocaust film
Schindler's List brought the southern city of Krakow
worldwide fame, thousands of tourists come to Poland annually to
visit the often well-preserved ruins of former Nazi German
camps.
Poland's Jewish community numbered 3 million residents before
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the country in 1939.
It is estimated that up to 20,000 remain. Studies for the museum
project say it should attract up to half a million visitors
annually.
(China Daily July 6, 2005)