U S Holocaust Memorial Museum

From the horrors of Nazism to the slaying of American hostage Leon Klinghoffer, continuing terrorism makes it imperative to remember "what human beings can do to other human beings," government and Jewish leaders said Wednesday in breaking ground for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Terror must be fought wherever it is aimed against innocent civilians," Elie Wiesel, chairman of the U.S.

A springtime trip became an intense journey into another time and place for 10 Los Alamitos High School students taking part in the National Youth Leadership Mission at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. For four days, the leaders of Griffins With a Mission, a group dedicated to promoting tolerance on campus and beyond, heard from other students and listened to stories from survivors of the Holocaust and other speakers at the gathering sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

John K. Roth can perhaps be forgiven for not expecting controversy when he won a high-ranking federal position in Washington. He was, after all, going to direct research and scholarship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a job more academic than political. But before Roth, a Claremont McKenna College philosophy professor and respected Holocaust scholar, could even head East, he came under attack by no less than the Jewish press, national columnist George Will and a couple of congressmen.

A vendor just off the National Mall hands Celia Barnes a bag of potato chips and points down 14th Street. "It's that way to the Holocaust," he says, directing the vacationing teacher to a limestone museum two blocks away. Having just exhausted herself at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the most popular tourist attraction in the city (and the world), Barnes is en route to the Vietnam Memorial, the 11th most popular site here. But first she has a ticket for the U.S.

When Bill Connelly heard that the heirs of a collector of Jewish memorial books were cleaning out his library, he rushed to New York and fished dozens of the Yiddish-language volumes out of a municipal trash bin. With their lists of residents from long-vanished European communities -- sometimes recorded street by street -- the books often are all that's left of entire villages or neighborhoods consumed in the Nazi genocide of World War II.

Dina Babbitt once made a deal with Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who subjected concentration-camp prisoners to horrendous medical experiments. He needed someone to illustrate his perverse racial theories with portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners, an inferior group according to Nazi ideology. A trained artist, she agreed to do the work as the price of saving her mother, as well as herself, from the concentration camp's gas chamber.

The 89-year-old white supremacist accused of killing a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in June had planned the attack for months and was on a suicide mission, a federal prosecutor said in court Wednesday. The disclosure came during a brief hearing in Washington federal court during which the suspect, James von Brunn, spoke publicly for the first time since the June 10 shooting. "The Constitution guarantees me a speedy and fair trial," Von Brunn said in a halting voice.

Architect James Ingo Freed, a refugee from Nazi Germany, will design the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum near the Washington Monument, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel said Thursday.