No ordinary museum: a place to take off one's shoes.

Irmgard Rosenberg was twenty-six years old when her brother Heinz was taken to the Treblinka extermination camp. It was the fall of 1943. The Minsk ghetto in the USSR, where Irmgard had been deported with her family, was liquidated soon after. Irmgard and her family were never heard from again. I simply cannot imagine being in her shoes.

But it was Irmgard's identity card I carried as I walked through the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., during its opening week. Some critics, I know, regard the use of such cards as a condescending gimmick. It was helpful to me. All I know about Irmgard is what was printed on the card given to me as I entered the museum, yet it is more than I knew about the hundreds, thousands, of other faces I saw there. Each screen displayed powerful footage. Each glass case documented important information. Every face cried out for recognition but so many simply flashed onto one of the many screens and then disappeared. I couldn't absorb it all; it was totally overwhelming. The sense of seeing only fragments of the horrible madness of the Holocaust made its sheer magnitude that much more real.

So I tried to hold onto just a few faces - usually the faces of children. There was a film clip of a mother and her son, a toddler, who was rocking slowly back and forth on a bed. He looked so quiet and still and vacant. And then in a film of still photos of some of the children orphaned by the Holocaust, on a screen in a narrow hallway with about ten or twenty different films running, there was a little orphaned boy holding a pair of grown-up shoes and laughing. Maybe they had been his father's shoes. How much people try to hold onto what was theirs. Not only the big things like their faith (which Elie Wiesel said was consumed by the flames at Auschwitz) and their belief in humanity (which Anne Frank wrote that she still maintained, despite all that had happened) and their hope which the Nazis did everything within their power to destroy) and each other (which became impossible), but they held onto their belongings: their toothbrushes, mirrors, umbrellas, and their shoes. The pile of toothbrushes was among the most troubling displays; people earnestly, desperately wanted to hold onto their "articles of daily living." Their attempt to maintain hope saw them packing their bags and bringing them on the freight cars. At the museum there was a huge pile of shoes - little children's shoes, workboots, women's pumps, shoes that made your feet ache terribly after an entire day of uselessly carrying heavy stones up a hill, shoes that marched you to your death, shoes that may have once grounded you and supported you which had become nothing but a curse. Irmgard, I cannot imagine being in your shoes.

In his remarks at the dedication ceremony for the Holocaust museum, Elie Wiesel said that the museum does not provide any answers. It is a question mark. Reluctant to proclaim any universal meaning or lesson to be gleaned from the tragedy of the Holocaust, Wiesel said that at least we must learn not to remain indifferent when people suffer. Perhaps the place to start, as Moses did, is to take off our shoes. In his speech at the museum dedication, President Bill Clinton cited the passage from Exodus (3:4-5). God called out to Moses and, albeit with some hesitation, Moses said "Here I am." And then God said, "Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground."