JERUSALEM -- Yad Vashem, the famed Holocaust museum here, is planning for a world without Holocaust survivors.

The museum aims to capture the interest of future generations by retelling the stories of those who survived the Nazi persecutions and those who perished. It is an exercise in imagination, technology and judgment.

The museum is digitizing 75 million records over the next three years, videotaping interviews with one-time concentration-camp inmates and using art and multimedia displays -- even a YouTube channel -- to create a record that will outlive the now-elderly survivors. "We have to set up a dialogue in the language of the younger generation," says Michael Lieber, the museum's 50-year-old chief information officer.

Efforts to get a last record of participants in historic events are as old as death masks but have changed with technology. In the U.S., the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1825 interviewed aging Revolutionary War veterans. In the early 1930s, filmmakers took black-and-white footage at Gettysburg of white-bearded Union and Confederate veterans pretending to re-enact Pickett's Charge. Around the same time, New Deal historians fanned out to interview and photograph the last blacks born as slaves.

Now, the Library of Congress and Britain's Imperial War Museum are collecting oral histories of veterans of World Wars I and II. Not long ago, British television aired interviews with the handful of surviving World War I soldiers.

Memorializing the Holocaust after the survivors are gone will be a challenge. That's because the act of survival itself has come to be seen as a political act. The German state was organized to exterminate European Jewry, so those Jews who managed to outlast the Nazis became a living rebuke of the system -- and a witness of what had occurred.

From the start, Yad Vashem -- the name refers to a Biblical verse about a "memorial and a name" -- looked to document who was murdered and how. The darkly lit museum, which opened in 1973, featured stunning photos of skin-and-bones inmates and the organized murder of Jews. Researchers sought witnesses to fill out "pages of testimony" for those who perished, a collection which now has three million names.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1993, sought to make history more personal. Museum-goers were handed cards with the stories of people swept up in the Holocaust. Exhibits there include a mound of shoes collected from concentration-camp inmates and a chimney-shaped wall of photos of those who perished. Video screens feature survivors telling their stories.

Among a Plaszow camp commander's photos, a snapshot from his girlfriend's visit.

Now the effort to capture the testimony of survivors of that era on tape is accelerating, as even the child inmates of concentration camps are in their 70s and 80s. (Had Anne Frank lived, she now would be 79 years old.)

Among the tapes Washington's museum is preparing is one with two Polish sisters describing how German soldiers turned up the volume on their radios to cover the screams of the Jews they were executing, and another with a train conductor at the Treblinka death camp describing what he saw. In another interview, a Lithuanian executioner describes how he tried to shoot his victims cleanly so they wouldn't suffer as much.

At Yad Vashem, the interview focus is still on Jewish victims. To avoid seeming too cinematic -- and less authentic -- the survivors are often filmed at home, rather than at sites of massacres. "We wanted it human being-to-human being," says Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's chairman. "Nothing is interfering."

In 2005, Yad Vashem replaced its old museum with one that, following the Washington museum's lead, focuses on the personal. Although many of the iconic photos of suffering remain, the museum also has a soaring conical wall filled with the photos of people from the era. Even Nazis who killed in the camps are presented in their day-to-day lives.

Scattered throughout the museum are dozens of black boxes with the photos on the cover of Nazis who ran killing squads or ghettos. Inside the boxes are mementos of their lives -- photos of them with their families, pieces of passports and other memorabilia. The box featuring Karl R. Kretschmer, a Gestapo official in Hungary, has a fragment of a letter he wrote to "Mommy" and "Dear Children" in which he urges them to "have deep faith in our Führer [which] gives us the strength to carry out difficult and thankless tasks."

The box of Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow, Poland, has a photo of a blonde child sitting on his lap. Another photo shows his girlfriend posing in front of the camp's electrified barbed wire. Viewers are left to ponder one of the deepest mysteries of the Holocaust: How could such ordinary people do such extraordinarily evil acts? "We want to bring into our memory that these people are human beings," says Mr. Shalev. "They're not satans."

The museum also uses new technology to reach a younger generation. Parts of its Web site are translated into Arabic and Persian, trying to reach out to places hostile to Israel. It also started a YouTube channel, with scenes of the museum and interviews with survivors, over the objections of some in the museum who felt the video Web site was too frivolous. Lapsing into IT-speak, Mr. Lieber, the Yad Vashem CIO, said he wants the museum to become a "trusted source" for Holocaust information for a new generation.

Although it's been more than 60 years since the camps were liberated, interest in the Holocaust remains intense, with even small towns in the U.S. and Europe erecting memorials. Mr. Shalev said that he felt the old Yad Vashem museum, however, had become "a bit flat" because it lacked a kind of personalization.

Within the new museum's exhibits, technology is used for startling effects. Many of the surviving films of Jewish victims are Nazi propaganda. One shows elders of the Jewish community in Siauliai, Lithuania, dressed in suits and carrying shovels to dig a trench. The intended message was that the Nazis were turning Jews into "productive" workers.

Yad Vashem edited the film so that every so often it freezes on the image of a person who the museum has managed to identify by name. Instead of appearing as icons of Jewish suffering, the Lithuanian Jews are seen as individuals, whose history has been reclaimed from Nazis.

"The person who was a metaphor in the old [Yad Vashem] museum, now has his name and his story," says Mr. Shalev -- a story he hopes will resonate well beyond the demise of the generation that was trapped by the Nazi machine.

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