ainment.
15.	Local Polish American organizations could sponsor a lunch or dinner reunion day to get the people together for a Polish American Heritage Month celebration.
16.	Hold a fundraiser to help the Polish American causes in your area or to help the needy children in Poland.
17.	Sponsor a Polish American evening social with music, food and entertainment.
18.	Contact the other Polish American organizations to see what they will be planning during National Polish American Heritage Month and possibly unite your efforts.
19.	Solicit several area businesses to donate towards a highway billboard that reads  WE SALUTE POLISH AMERICANS DURING OCTOBER.  List their names on the billboard, it s great advertising. (Sample billboard artwork available upon request)
20.	Wear red and white or  Polish and Proud  butte local events and encourage others to do the same.
21.	Tell friends and family about National Polish Heritage Month events and invite them to attend celebrations.
22.	Encourage everyone you know to join a Polish organization.
23.	Encourage everyone to read a book about Polish contributions or a book written by a Pole or a Polish
24.	If there is a Polish American radio program in yo them to do something special during regular pre throughout the month of October.
WE ENCOURAGE ALL TO WRITE FOR INFO! ABOUT ANY OF THE SUGGESTIONS LISTED FORMATION IS FREE. THE ADDRESS IS: POLI< ICAN HERITAGE-MONTH COMMITTEE, 308 STREET, PHILADELPHIA, PA 19106; PHO1 922-1700.
LET S GET TOGETHER AND CELEBRATE!
180
At the Gates of Nightmare
A New Museum Raises Old Questions
Abmu Eni and Ourselves
Henry Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and who can name one of them?
Well, there s Anne Frank. And, if you re Jewish, there s a grandmother at Treblinka, a cousin at Auschwitz, and all the faces touched by forefingers in photo albums. . . that was your mother's great-uncle George, he won medals for swimming and later he owned a factory that made mother-of-pearl brushes.
After that, nothing but a number the Six Million. As Stalin is said to have said,  A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. 
The statistic what does it mean? is the companion of the images buried in your nervous system like herpes viruses: the barbed wire, the overcoats and soup bowls, the innocence of starvation eyes, tra s> gas, children, experiments, smokestacks, the pornography of Nazi evildagger sticks, dogs, Hitler s frantic rao voice, torches and then the Allies  .dozers pushing slow piles of bodies into pits.
Whatever it means, this is our Holo-^t, the memorial inside our heads. JVe built it from television, books, trials and college courses.
Now we have the U.S. Holocaust Me-iilTaLMuseum  which opens Monday, off Independence Avenue.
the m\i Put th6 Holocaust next to tock	merry-go-round, moon
spirip3?^ Ot^CT tr'umPbs the human 'iisast We Want t0 cornmemorate a the why not a museum of slavery or ^aghter of Cambodia?
head^f u Michael Berenbaum, e museum s research center.
have them. 
di^     argument goes, many slaves but their owners wanted
them alive not dead. Unlike the miffion or so Cambodians killed by Pol Pot the Jews were not being killed for their politics, intellect or even religion, but for their race.
Why a museum dedicated almost entirely to the Jews who died in the Holo-
The-swer runs along thel   i.	Gypsies,
Jehovah s Witnesses, Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, the insane and the enfeebled too, but not with the earnestness they brought to the Jews. The scope, intention and logic of the Jewish Holocaust make it unique.
Why have a memorial to a European genocide in the capital of the United States of America?
 I myself am not happy about having a building on the Mall. I belong to a generation that says a building cannot express mis idea,  says literary critic Alfred Kazin.  I don t think the Holocaust is part of American culture. 
John Roth, a professor of Claremont McKenna College in California, says the museum belongs here.  Auschwitz and Treblinka those death camps shadow American ground. They warn us never to take the Dream for granted. 
More reasoning:
If we have museums of art from Asia, Africa and Europe, there s no reason to ban this museum because the Holocaust happened on another continent.
The museum illustrates American values by displaying their opposite.
The Holocaust is a moral absolute worth commemorating in an age of moral relativity.
The Holocaust gets used to denote an endless list of evils-the slaughter of the bos, AIDS, abortion and animal experimentation. Shouldn t we try to keep opportunists from misusing it?
On and on and on.
The Holocaust has been  corrupted by sentimentality, emotionalism and bathos,  writes scholar Jacob Neusner.
 Now it s getting invoked when we re talking about Bosnia,  says Peter Novick, a historian at the University of Chicago.  We re supposed to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. This is especially dopey. What is the lesson? That killing 6 million men, women and children is wrong? We knew that! What the hell are these lessons? 
It doesn t matter. That fact is, the Holocaust Museum is here, a national monument. But what does it mean?
It is a brick and limestone building that reminds you of the factory on the edge of town when you were growing up, an industrial smugness about it. It has metal doors with big bolts in the frames. It has smokestacks, towers and blind niches. It has a lonely row of metal-shrouded security lights jutting from the wall. It overwhelms you with a sort of grim seniority, like a prison or like a railroad station in a bad memory. It looks like an old photograph of itself. Its indifference is crushing.
Inside, you feel as though you re being processed through the exhibit rather than strolling through it. A staircase narrows as it rises. Catwalks over the Hall of Witnesses provoke a Piranesian paranoia. You sense how industrial engineering and 20th century social engineering are the same thing, the same belief in rationality s ability to solve problems.
Zygmunt Bauman writes in  Modernity and the Holocaust  that  modem genocide is a grand vision of a better, and radically different, society.  From the Nazi point of view, the killing of the Jews  was not the work of destruction, but creation. They were eliminated so that an objectively better human world-more efficient, more moral, more beautiful could be established.
7. THE ETHNIC LEGACY
It took the planning and machinery of the Holocaust a work of mass genius in its way to get the job done. The old pogrom techniques wouldn t do. For instance, Kristallnacht, when the Nazis went berserk and attacked Jews all over Germany, was a pogrom of the sort the Jews had endured for centuries. About 100 Jews were killed. As Bauman points out, at that rate it would have taken 200 years to kill the Jews who were killed by the Holocaust.
Reason, efficiency, a grand vision.
 Wouldn t you be happier if I had been able to show you that all the perpetrators were crazy?  writes historian Raul Hilberg.
Yes, indeed. By calling it madness, you absolve both the Nazis and yourself from responsibility for the Holocaust. You say it s not quite real. This is one of the many ways of explaining how it happened.
It cannot be understood. It must be understood. It is unique. It is universal. On and on.
It happened because of the glamour of evil.
It happened because of the banality of evil.
It happened because Hitler had intended the whole thing all along. (Known as the  intentionalist  position.)
It happened because Hitler was only looking for an answer to  the Jewish question,  and Germany s bureaucracy, technology and culture created the death camps as the solution. (The  functionalist  position.)
It happened because mankind is inherently evil. (The Hobbesian or Original Sin position.)
It happened because mankind is inherently good, but corrupted by society. (The Rousseauian position.)
It happened because the Jews participated in their own destruction, from the Judenrates governing the ghettos to the Jewish kapos in the camps.
It happened despite brave and constant resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising being the most famous.
It happened because the Allies didn t do more to destroy Auschwitz and other camps.
It happened because there was nothing the Allies could do if the bombers couldn t take out the Third Reich s ballbearing factories, how could they take out the camps?
It happened, and half a century later you take a small, grim elevator to the
fourth floor, and descend through the permanent exhibit. In keeping with the latest museum technology, there are video screens everywhere, enough to prompt the feeling you get from the TV walls in electronics stores as if you re being stared at by blind people, an unsettling blend of reality and unreality. Nazis salute Hitler with beefy tiptoe eagerness. They smash the windows of Jewish stores. And all the photographs: bookburning gleefulness, and an SS officer by the railroad tracks in Auschwitz, ordering- people to the right or left, to death now or death later. As Tadeusz Borowski put it in the title of his Auschwitz memoir:  This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. 
Holocaust photographs are nothing new. They hardly seem real anymore. But the sense of reality tingles quite vividly at the sight of the Hollerith machine. There, glowering with the bustling potential you remember from old sewing machines, is the IBM computer that sorted lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life, into stacks of punch cards.
As you descend from floor to floor, things get even realer: A boxcar that hauled people to 'freblinka it smells like a bureau drawer in a summer house. A pile of shoes. The ovens. Then the newsreels of the liberation. The bulldozers. The eyes.
Carved into a museum wall is the testimony of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
 The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there developed a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda. 
How strange. Who could forget something as real as the Holocaust?
Everybody could forget.
Or at least a lot of people didn t want to remember, or know.
Primo Levi, an Italian survivor of Auschwitz, describes the first Russian troops to reach the camp:
 They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint ... It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or to submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another
man s crime; the feeling of gi a crime should exist, that it been introduced irrevocabl world of things that exist. 
Irrevocably. What a triun Simon Wiesenthal rem troopers telling the prisoner
 There will be no certai