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I am a first-generation American, born, like the nation, in Philadelphia, the child of refugees from European barbarism. Both my parents, in their separate youths, escaped the Nazi effort to murder all Jews; many in my family were not so lucky. I knew this fact, in some form, from as early in my life as I remember knowing anything significant. To a degree, I derived pride and a sense of romance from the distinctiveness of this awful yet dramatic heritage: I was glad to have a story that gave shape and meaning to my origins, and thereby provided me with a consciousness of destiny. I understood that my life belonged not only to me but to the course of history.
Yet the story, the details of which I knew only sketchily until I was nearly twenty, worried me too. I had a dream around the age of seven or eight, a dream I may have dreamed more than once, of a vast, darkened plain across which masses of people fled in chaotic haste, pursued and at times surrounded by other equally chaotic masses. Fire at the margins of the scene illuminated the action, the only possible outcome of which seemed to be isolation and annihilation. I survived, of course, because I woke up; the slaughter ended before I did.
The phrase that became attached to this hateful vision was, "The Nazis are coming." I don't know if I thought the words in my sleep, or if I added them afterward. The experience seemed at once absolutely true and absolutely useless. Nothing could be learned from it, nothing taken away; there was nothing in it for life.
I was reminded of this dream of terror last April, when I visited the newly opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the latest addition to the federal museum system--a $168 million facility built by federal decree on a plot of priceless federal land just off the National Mall in Washington, D.C. There I spoke with Michael Berenbaum, who was the museum's project director throughout its planning and construction. A rabbi and professor of theology at Georgetown University, he explained to me that the museum's mission is twofold: to memorialize the victims of Nazism by providing an exhaustive historical narrative...