SKOKIE, Ill. — Barbara Steiner survived life as a child in the Warsaw ghetto and three Nazi death camps, emerging against dreadful odds without family or belongings but with a powerful story to tell. Yet for decades she was quiet about her trauma, concentrating on a new life raising her children in this placid suburb northwest of Chicago.

Thirty-two years ago this summer, however, that peace was shattered when a group of American neo-Nazis threatened to march through the village, a destination carefully picked for its psychological punch: at the time, Skokie was home to many thousands of Jews like Ms. Steiner who were Holocaust survivors or their relatives.

The threatened march put Skokie at the bull’s-eye of a national debate about free speech and democratic ideals. And although the march never materialized here, it prompted a movement among the death camp survivors that manifested itself in an urge to speak up and teach the lessons of their lives.

And so they organized a group and got to work.

All those decades of effort came to fruition this weekend in the form of the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, in the very village the neo-Nazis had hoped to horrify. The museum was shaped by what may be the last generation of Holocaust survivors to have such influence over their own stories.

“It’s a dream come true and more,” Ms. Steiner said, preparing for the public opening on Sunday morning, at which former President Bill Clinton was scheduled to give a keynote address.

“Magnificent is the only word for something so beautiful,” she said.

The 66,000 square feet of exhibit space asks universal questions about human rights, as many Holocaust memorials do. But unlike similar institutions, the Skokie museum is almost totally anchored in the local, brought to life with the personal pictures, documents, clothing, testimonies and other artifacts of the building’s own neighbors.

And several of the Holocaust survivors are working as docents and other staff members, weaving their first-person stories into the history, exploring issues of genocide around the world. They are candid about how their sense of tranquillity was shattered by the threat of having to encounter the swastika on Skokie’s streets, decades after their desperate escapes from the Nazis.

“The rightful place for this is here, because of the march,” said Samuel R. Harris, the president of the museum and learning center, whose parents and siblings were killed at the Treblinka death camp. “You must know what fear the swastika brings to a survivor. The fear is immense, more than you can write. I felt, what can I do? Very simple solution: education.”

The museum’s co-curator, Yitzchak Mais, former director of the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, explained its significance as filling a largely unexplored niche.

“These are your neighbors from the Midwest,” Mr. Mais said. “You’ll realize that you walked on the street with them, shopped with them at the grocery, sat with them at the movie theater.”

“You’ve lived with the witnesses,” he went on. “It removes the distance. This didn’t happen a thousand miles away. It’s about right here, and that’s very clear.”

Long before the group of survivors, officially called the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, had a sparkling new building complete with art galleries and a children’s wing, it did its work out of a modest storefront on Main Street in a residential neighborhood next to a pub.

Without large donors or the attention of designers and architects, they cobbled together a modest but poignant exhibit that welcomed busloads of schoolchildren and anyone else who wanted to hear their stories. There were about 20 or 30 members, Ms. Steiner recalls. (Of that original group, she said, only three are alive today.)

They worked with little fanfare until an epiphany of sorts. It was time to do some repairs to the storefront. What if they skipped the repair work and instead put their energy into fund-raising for a whole new center?

“They began to dream,” said Richard S. Hirschhaut, the museum’s executive director. “And this is an organization that had an annual budget at its high point of $200,000.”

But, as Mr. Hirschhaut said, it was a group known for its “luck and pluck.” “They started asking, ‘What if we could do more, reach more people? And how do we do it?’ ” he said. “It was an easy sell for newcomers who have fallen in love with the survivors, who adore and respect them, to go forward.”

One such relative newcomer to the group was J. B. Pritzker of Chicago, the philanthropist scion of the Hyatt hotel chain and other investments, who said he had become enchanted by the survivors, adopting their dream as his own.

Approached to be the capital campaign chairman about 10 years ago, Mr. Pritzker, the managing partner of a private investment firm, accepted. He brought the group from having essentially nothing in the bank to where it is today, several tens of millions of dollars later.

Ms. Steiner, a former bookkeeper at Sears and other department stores, remembers the planning stages.

“When they were talking about millions, I said, ‘Wait! You’re talking about millions! You’re kidding, right? How are we able to do that?’ ” she recalled telling Mr. Pritzker in a meeting. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have the money.’ Thank God I was wrong. He was right.”

Mr. Pritzker, leading a pre-opening tour, said, “The lesson we’re trying to teach is that in small ways in everyday life we can rise and be up-standers. This is the universal message that the museum is all about.”

Among the people who will be telling their stories at the museum is Aaron Elster, who moved to Skokie in 1955 by way of New York City. This is where his nightmares of hiding in a Polish family’s attic for two years during the Holocaust began to subside.

“Like many people, I didn’t want to speak about my background,” said Mr. Elster, 76, a retired insurance executive. “I didn’t want to be known as a victim. But while we can, I feel that it’s incumbent on every survivor to speak up.”

So many are already gone.

“I personally believe that their souls are here,” Mr. Elster said. “And it becomes a holy place for people like myself.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/19skokie.html?pagewanted=print

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company