The visitors stopped before a wooden boxcar, previously owned by the Ruhr Chemicals Co. of Germany. 

Voices quieted and all eyes examined it. 

A boxcar like it carried some 6 million Jews to their death during the Holocaust. 

They walked up an entrance ramp and stopped, still silent. The railroad car is made of wood and some of the slats are broken. The replica was so convincing that one could almost imagine members of a Jewish family inside, terrified to be herded by Nazi soldiers with bayoneted rifles yet trying to maintain their dignity.

The Jewish Federation of the Quad-Cities recently sponsored a bus trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, and about 50 area Jews and other interested residents made the daylong journey to the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill. 

It was a sobering reminder of a past now more than 60 years old.

“This shows what really happened,” said Melvin Kovitz of Rock Island, who traveled with his wife, Maxine. 

Kovitz is a military veteran who visited the infamous Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by U.S. soldiers mere days before the end of World War II.

“What I saw here today reminds me of that trip,” he said. “When I was at Dachau, there were still bloodstains on the ground.”

 

Reason for the location 

The new museum is located off the Edens Expressway in Skokie. This area north of the city and not far from Lake Michigan is the postwar home to about 7,000 Jews who lived through the World War II atrocities, making them the second-largest such contingent in the United States.

In 1976-77, a group of neo-Nazi followers staged a controversial demonstration in Skokie. It was a wake-up call to Holocaust survivors, many of whom had chosen not to discuss their war experiences. 

A huge counter-demonstration attracted thousands of Jewish supporters and outspoken national personalities. The protesters included some people from the Quad-Cities such as the late Herbert Kramer of Davenport, said his widow, Ida Kramer.

Those demonstrations spawned the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, and a small museum was built in a Skokie storefront.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum was built from 2006 to 2009 at a cost of $45 million. The 65,000-square-foot, three-part structure was designed by architect Stanley Tigerman. There is still some ongoing construction, but the building is mostly complete.

It is the largest facility of its kind in the Midwest and among a number of museums devoted to Holocaust remembrance. Others are in Israel, Washington and Los Angeles. Officials believe it probably will be the last one built with active participation from survivors of the Nazi death camps.

 

Daily remembrance

The museum’s signature phrase is carved in stone near the front entrance: “Remember the past. Transform the future.”

This is quite how the Holocaust is commemorated by today’s Jews, said Allan Ross, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Quad-Cities.

Holocaust remembrance is part of weekly services that honor the victims, and the Jewish people have resolved to try to prevent further genocide, he explained. 

Ross thinks about the Holocaust every day because his own father was a survivor. He also organizes Holocaust remembrance services that are held each spring in the Quad-Cities.

 

On the dark side

The museum tour starts on the “dark” side of the structure and ends in the light. This is Tigerman’s design, to reflect the actual Holocaust event timeline that begins in 1933, when Adolf Hitler ascended to the leadership of Nazi Germany, until 1948 and the establishment of Israel as the Jewish homeland.

The building is made of dark stone on one side, with sharp edges and angles. The light stone on the opposite side includes flowing rooflines and windows. Between the two — in the “cleave” — is the authentic early 20th-century German rail car, a top museum attraction. It is not known whether this particular boxcar actually was used to transport Jews to the camps, said Rita Mathias, a docent at the museum.

Many of today’s survivors were young children during the war, when the camps basically operated from 1940 to 1945. It is estimated that 150,000 to 300,000 Holocaust survivors are still living in the United States, Mathias said. Some visit the museum, and she meets them before conducting a tour. Each has a story about surviving terrible circumstances, she added.

 

Good from the bad

The Quad-City visitors raved about their docent tour guides, who underwent 23 weeks of training for the volunteer positions. 

Marrietta Castle of Rock Island went on the trip especially to check out the youth exhibit. Castle, an educator, works with the Jeff Leibovitz Special Collection of Holocaust Education materials at the library of the Western Illinois University-Quad-Cities campus in Moline.

“They did a great job with the youth exhibit,” she said, describing the entire museum as “wonderful.” The permanent exhibit shows how good came out of the bad, she added.

Some found the dark part of the structure forbidding, including Marlyne Weiner of Rock Island. “It was wearying,” she said of her experience.

Dorothy Carlson agreed and said the two-hour tour “drains you completely.

“I really noticed how scared you would be all the time,” added Carlson, a longtime Davenport resident who grew up in Chicago with many Jewish friends. “You’d have to be always on alert and could not drop your guard.”

For some who made the trip, the Skokie site is the fifth Holocaust museum they have seen, including Weiner and Kramer. She speaks publicly about the Holocaust to school groups and area organizations.

“We see what happens when people go silent,” she said after the tour. “It’s important that we teach about the Holocaust, and it’s important that we teach tolerance and diversity.”