49

"The Yad Vashem Museum is not on your tour, but you are here and you need to see it."

"Why isn't the Holocaust Museum on everyone's tour?" I ask.

He gives his shrug. "Some people it makes sad."

"It should make everyone sad."

He holds my glance in the mirror a moment before he swings his hand at the backhoes carving off a hillside. "It is once Mt. Zion. But now it is especially for the Holocaust."

He honks the horn. A gate lifts and he drives through. But he doesn't pause beside the iron sculpture forming statues of emaciated dead into the rigidity of barbed wire. He merely jockeys the van into a parking space, and when we get out, he strides down the sidewalk.

"This is the Memorial for the Children."

A carved child's face smiles down at us from above the entrance, and lighted photographs of six more happy children swirl in shifting mirrors before the darkness envelopes us. "Stay close to the railing," Sol whispers above the carpeting that muffles our steps.

Six small candles bum behind a glass, and revolving mirrors reflect and multiply the tiny flames into six million pin-points of brilliance.

Clinging to a cold metal banister, we walk single-file through a night clear with millions of stars before we emerge into the sunlight again.

My eyes water with more than the brightness, and I try to wipe surreptitiously beneath my sunglasses, but Rory nonetheless hands me his handkerchief.

Sol walks on and indicates a bronze bas-relief of a man with a group of children. "This is Mt. Hertzle, it is named for the Polish teacher who isn't giving up the Jewish children to the Nazis. He is taken to Auschwitz, too. None of them is coming out."

We pass a grove of strange bent trees, each bearing a brass plaque.

"What are these?" Megan asks.

"This is trees dedicated to Gentiles who try to help the Jews. Some die, some don't." He stoops, picks up long brown beans, dried to the consistency of leather. "Try This. It is John Bread."

We dutifully bite into leather sheath.

"It tastes like chocolate,"Rory says.

Sol nods. "Carob. Here in Yad Vashem, it is planted to show that out of the bitter comes the sweet. They want the fruit, but not the ordinary fruit like peaches or plums. They want to remember the victims and show that life is unchanging. So they plant the John Bread."

He waves us into the entryway of another building whose lobby is ringed with bas-relief scenes in gray stone. "Here is the story of the Holocaust."

The figures are caricatures with the straight-on eyes of hieroglyphs set in profile faces. The bodies have cartoon, four-fmgered hands and thickened and thickened arms and legs.

Sol sees me looking at them. "In tradition, it is not good to make the representation of human forms, so the artist is making the people with three fingers and the thumb."

"Like Mickey Mouse," Elizabeth says.

Sol ignores her. "Here is the Jewish people going about their business,making the cakes, fixing the horseshoes, like everybody. The Jews is fitting in with the lifes of the people around them. But then the Nazis come-"

The imaged Nazis are fat and comic."

"The Jews try to get away, but they cannot. See, this man is running. Many is killed, and the ones left is taken away." He steps to the next stone scene. "Here is the smokestacks of the ovens of the concentration camps."

The gray stone sculpture has been too sanitized, and I look away. Iresee the memorial in the Israeli pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair. On a simple gray pedestal rested a worn pair of child's high-tops. The laces hung from the eyelet holes as if the four-year-old had just untied and dropped his shoes.

"But after the war, the good is coming," Sol is saying. "Here is people coming to Israel to make the new country. Out of the bad comes the good, just like with the carob. Israel is being made out of the ashes of the six million."