Yad Vashem History Museum

Nearly 63 years later, the words still burn forth from the yellowed, fragile scrap of cardboard-like paper on which they were written in the greatest of haste, yet somehow miraculously preserved. "My darlings! I am on a train," Esther Frankel, a Polish Jew who was born Esther Horonchik, wrote to her family in Paris in August 1942 as she was being deported to Auschwitz.

Nearly 63 years later, the words still burn forth from the yellowed, fragile scrap of cardboard-like paper on which they were written in the greatest of haste, yet somehow miraculously preserved. "My darlings! I am on a train," Esther Frankel, a Polish Jew who was born Esther Horonchik, wrote to her family in Paris in August 1942 as she was being deported to Auschwitz.

A 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor donated jewelry he took from the clothing of Jews who were gassed to death at the Nazi camp to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum on Monday. Polish-born Meyer Hack, who now lives in Boston, found the gems while sorting the clothing of victims sent to die in the gas chambers, which was his job at the camp where his mother, brother and two sisters died. He hid the eight rings, watches and brooches of diamonds and gold beneath his barracks.

A Holocaust museum in Israel has slightly softened its rhetoric regarding the inaction of Pope Pius XII in the face of the deportation of Jews during World War II. Yad Vashem -- the cultural center for Holocaust studies in Jerusalem -- changed the wording on an explanatory wall panel that is part of an ongoing display. The modified wall panel, which was installed Sunday, incorporates views of those who defend the Pope.  Pope Pius XII has long been a figure of contention between the Vatican and Israel.

The climate-controlled room whirs with electronics. A digital recorder copies a 46-year-old video of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Other machines digitize audio testimonies taped by Holocaust survivors. Microfilmed war documents flash across a digital scanner at two images per second, or 5 million a month. Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum is getting its huge archive ready to go online. In Washington, the U.S.