The Museum, financed by the city of Berlin, may well turn out to be a major symbol of the collective guilt of the German nation. It would remain, for all time to come, a sad and grim reminder of how the Jews were deprived of civic equality and barred from various professions (1933), how marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans was forbidden (1935), and how another wave of legislation in 1938 impoverished the Jews by stripping them of their property. The same year, on November 9 and 10, Joseph Goebbels incited the Kristallacht riots (The Night of the Broken Glass). People watched passively while 20 synagogues were set on fire and Jewish businesses vandalised. Appropriately enough, Liebeskind's 49 pillars outside the precincts of the Jewish Museum symbolise exile and emigration.

Berlin was once the centre of Jewish life inGermany. In 1933, the year Hitler was appointed chancellor, 160,564 Jews lived in Berlin. Their numbers dwindled to 75,334 in 1939, when Hitler's vision to clear Germany of Jews through emigration was translated into practice by Himmler's SS. Five years later, only 5,100 Jews remained in Berlin. Today, there are 10,000 registered with the Jew-ish Community Centre. The rise is largely due to an increase in the number of immigrants from Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in 1990.

If you have strong nerves, visit the Sach-senhausen Concentra-tion Camp in Oranien-burg, near the Reich capital of Berlin. Built in 1936, this camp imprisoned 200,000 people from various nations between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands died of hunger, disease, forced labour, maltreatment or by organised murder operations of 33,190 people. As many as 41,830 prisoners died while being transferred to other concentration camps. The Jews at Sachsenhausen were removed in October 1942 to Auschwitz, following Himmler's decisionto ``free'' all the concentration camps in the Old Reich of Jewish prisoners.

You see the relics and traces of a monstrous regime the Commandant's area, the SS Casino, the roll call area, the site of the gallows, the barracks, the prisons, the crematorium and extermination site Station Z, execution trenches with bullet catch and automatic gallows, and a pathology laboratory with a cellar of corpses. You see much more and realise the enormity of the tragedy, the deep psychological obsessions of Hitler and his men who saw the Jew not only as the cause of present ills, manifested above all in the rising Bolshevik threat, but also as the very metaphysical sou-rce of evil itself spanning the centuries.

At the same time, one is comforted to learn about the heroic struggle against the Nazis. The photographs of many brave men and women, particularly communists, who were tortured and killed in this camp and elsewhere for their resistance to the Nazis, reinforces your faith in humanity. There are some who diewithout capitulating before the forces of tyranny. Appropriately enough, Soviet and Polish units of the Red Army liberated the camp on April 22-23, 1945.

The Holocaust casts its shadow over many aspects of Jewish life. But in responding to its catastrophic consequences, many Jewish groups have failed to draw lessons from their own history. In Israel, in particular, they have turned a blind eye to their obligations towards the beleaguered Arabs and disregarded the legitimate claims of the Palestinians. In their search for their ``Promised Land'', aggressive Zionists have displaced and dispossessed millions of Palestinians from their homeland. The state of Israel would vindicate its raison d'etre only by recognising the demand for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its epicentre. The historic injustice done in 1948 and thereafter must be set right.

We, in India, must also learn from the Holocaust. The burning of the synagogues was a ghastly and chilling event, a prelude to the spread offascism in Europe. We must not let those scenes be re-enacted, for such brazen acts of vandalism destroy the moral and social fabric of any society.

Places of worship, even if they convey a sense of otherness, must not be vandalised. In a multi-religious country like ours their presence symbolise the fulfilment of a secular dream. India would cease to be the envy of the rest of the world if some hot-headed fanatics take away our dreams. The same applies to symbols connected with the Buddhists, Turks, Mughals, and the British. We may not like them, but can we deny that they form part of an Indian heritage?

Turning to more recent times, it may be worth setting up an Archives on India's Partition. We need a Spielberg to unfold the horrors perpetrated, in 1946-7, in the name of religion.

True, taking testimony on video involves many issues, including the time factor, the public act of witness, and a pedagogically effective medium. It is also true that the video testimony is a new genre, with its own realismand sociology, a genre with implications we do not, as yet, completely understand. Still, the initiative may be worthwhile for recording a tragic and traumatic phase of our 20th century history.