In a stark slab of a room, cold and dim, a red Nazi flag hangs above a small wooden desk. A glaring portrait of Adolf Hitler adorns another wall.
”Achtung! Achtung!” a voice barks from loudspeakers. ”All Jews must be identified. Step forward!”
A grim-faced Nazi soldier emerges from the shadows and directs a group of wide-eyed 8th graders from the Brandon Street Christian Academy to step through a railing and stand behind a yellow line.
Suddenly, lights glare in their eyes. Each is handed a yellow cloth Star of David.
”According to our records, all who are in this room are Jews,” the voice booms. ”This yellow patch must be worn on your chest in plain sight at all times. No exceptions. No exceptions.”
Immediately, another door swings open, and the new ”Jews” are herded down a hall amid a cacaphony of angry voices and screams.
”All of you vermin move into the car,” a voice snarls.
The students clamber into a wood-slatted railroad boxcar. The Nazi soldier shoves the laggards from behind, and the door clangs shut.
Inside, the boxcar begins to pitch as if in motion and two lanterns clatter against the iron ceiling. There are voices in here, too.
”Mama, mama,” a child calls.
”I wonder where we are going?”
And then there is a woman`s voice, which identifies itself as that of Corrie ten Boom. She is asked by another passsenger if she is Jewish, and she says no.
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”But why should you be taken with us? What crime have you committed?”
the other passenger persists.
”For obeying God, for loving his chosen people . . . for hiding them in our home,” Ten Boom replies.
Thus begins what may be the world`s most unusual Holocaust memorial, an intense 33-minute descent, filled with special effects, into the chilling experiences of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman banished to the Ravensbruck concentration camp for helping hide hundreds of Jews in her home during World War II.
The story unfolds in an exhibit called ”The Hiding Place,” notable not only because it is billed as the world`s first high-tech Holocaust memorial, but also because it is located at the Mike Evans Ministry, a fundamentalist Christian church in a town of 24,000 just outside Ft. Worth.
Evans, 40, a born-again Christian evangelist whose mother was a Jew, says he created The Hiding Place ”because this was a story of a Christian family that was willing to lay down their lives for the Jewish people, which in our opinion is a great way of combating anti-Semitism.”
”We subscribe to the concept of `Never again.` We want Christians to be educated that this actually happened . . . that these people died,” he said. The exhibit also underscores a surge of interest in the Christians who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis, an aspect of the Holocaust that has been overshadowed by the horror of the event itself, experts say.
In the last three years, a spate of new books, movies and television programs has focused on these people, from the Swedish diplomat-businessman Raoul Wallenberg, who is credited with saving thousands of Jews in Hungary, to the entire French mountain village of Le Chambon, which sheltered 2,500 Jews, almost as many as the population of the village itself.
”This is a phenomenon whose time has come,” says Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who started the Foundation to Sustain the Righteous Christians about a year ago. ”It is motivated by a desire to live beyond the Holocaust. After 40 years, we are looking back and trying desperately to find some sparks that are hidden among those cremated ashes.”
The foundation, which recently merged with the Anti-Defamation League, is trying to identify and aid the ”tens of thousands” of Christians who rescued Jews in World War II. That effort has roots in Israel, where an organization called Yad Vashem erected a memorial in 1954 to 6,000 ”righteous Gentiles.” Last year the league created a ”Courage to Care” award, named after the 1986 Academy-award nominated documentary that profiled some of those who rescued Jews.
After dwelling on the Holocaust itself for a decade, says Dr. Dennis Klein, director of the International Center for Holocaust Studies, ”people are more open to hearing stories that are more hopeful and heartening.”
In Euless, the boxcar disgorges its ”prisoners” into a ”concentration camp,” a large room decorated with tattered prison garments and a hangman`s noose. There, a graphic but artful presentation, filled with special lighting and visual effects, tells the story of Ten Boom`s arrest in 1944, when she was 52, and her months at Ravensbruck, the only Nazi concentration camp solely for women.
Against a collage of photos of cadaverous concentration camp victims and naked bodies being fed into ovens, the voices of Nazi guards joke about extracting gold fillings from the teeth of Jews.
”Oh God, are you there, in this place?” cries Corrie, whose sister Betsie died in the camp.
Later, the visitors crowd into a narrow ”hiding place,” listening to the muffled voices of Nazi troops searching the house. The real hiding place is now a museum in the Ten Boom home and clock shop in Haarlem, Holland.
During the war, the Ten Booms constructed a false wall to create a 2 1/2- foot-wide space behind a full-length bookshelf in Corrie`s third floor bedroom. It had a 2-foot-square secret entrance panel, and served as a temporary refuge until Ten Boom`s brother, Willem, could guide Jews to the underground and freedom.
In the end, Ten Boom, who died in 1983, explains why she risked her life for the Jews: ”Because my savior and Lord is Jewish. I do it for his sake.” The splashy special effects could be criticized as a ”slick Madison Avenue” approach to the Holocaust, Evans admits, but he defends the treatment as a way to reach children.
”We wanted to create something that utilized special effects in a way children would never forget,” he says.
The production is aimed at children, Evans says, because ”we want to present a role model of Christian character to them. We`d rather have a Christian hero be Corrie ten Boom, not Mr. T or Rambo. We don`t think it serves a purpose for children to idolize a fellow that blows up bridges and cars.”
Some critics, however, contend that Evans` real purpose is to convert Jews. Mark Briskman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, says Evans stirred up ”a tremendous controversy” in 1978 when he opened his ministry on Long Island, across from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
”He was trying to convert Jews, no question about it,” Briskman says.
”He has tried to gain a veneer of respectability by demonstrating pro-Israel support, but based on past experience, we view his activities with suspicion.”
Evans, who says he was the victim of anti-Semitism as a child in Springfield, Mass., insists, ”I believe very strongly in being born again, but I do not believe that Christians should be trying to shove Jesus down Jewish people`s throats.”
Whatever the purpose of the Holocaust exhibit, the effect can be wrenching.
”It was scary,” said Flora Caballero, 14. ”I felt like I was hiding all the time.”
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