Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

You enter the cave of horrors in the basement of an Ottoman-era house that is now a small yeshiva just outside the medieval walls of the Old City. On the one hand, there could be no better encapsulation of Jerusalem than this: disjointed histories piled one atop the other like dishes in the sink, all beneath the shade of Aleppo pines. On the other, there is something immediately decrepit about the place. It is wrenchingly nondescript; it looks like extra storage for folding chairs or even for cleaning supplies. Were it not for a Hebrew plaque on the limestone gate outside that reads Martef HaShoah, or The Holocaust Cellar, next to an arrow pointing in its direction, you would have no idea where you had arrived. Even now, no notice identifies this rough place as the first Holocaust memorial ever built.    The cellar was inaugurated in 1949 on Mount Zion. It is a monument to the destruction of the Jewish people, yes, but also a monument to the way the destruction was understood in its immediate aftermath by those who had survived, and in the newly established Jewish state. But despite its location, a stone’s throw from King David’s alleged tomb, the cellar is not, nor was it ever, an august institution that sought to stipulate a collective memory of catastrophe or to impose a narrative interpretation of any kind. No museology or mixed media went into the creation of this dark shrine. It is a site of raw memory, and also a kind of Wunderkammer of catastrophe. There are many Holocaust memorials and museums in the world now, but there is no other place quite like this one. To enter it is to confront, without any philosophical or historiographical or aesthetic mediation, in the most startlingly direct way, the unvarnished blinding horror of a vanished moment, before that horror was sanitized into language and meaning. The place is truly terrifying.   The entire space is pitch dark, dank, and smells of mold from years of water dripping on ancient stone. This is a place where survivors brought whatever obscene relics they had salvaged from the camps and had somehow managed to carry to Palestine after the war: lampshades made from Torah scrolls, canisters of zyklon-B, the chemical used in the gas chambers, and bars of soap made from human body oil, all displayed in a candle-lit cave in a prominent glass vitrine with tattered green velvet lining. The soap bars turn out to be fake; there is no evidence that the Nazis ever made soap out of human flesh. But that is entirely beside the point: the soap represents one of the cruelest rumors that circulated in the camps, which these survivors believed to be true — and here, in this cellar, what you come to see is how they understood the catastrophe that they had endured, what they remembered of it and how they began to represent those memories with material objects. The mentality that tortured them and sustained them in equal measure is arguably the most important thing on display.    Toward the end of the cellar, to the extent that it has an exposition, is a small niche that resembles an oratory. Here you see ashes — called “martyrs’ ashes” — from the concentration camps, brought to Israel in June 1949 in a series of glass jars, painted in blue and white stripes with yellow Stars of David, to mirror the uniform that so many Jews had worn up until their deaths. It is an indescribably desolating feeling to stand there in this putrid cellar, in front of those ashes, and to think of the unnamed bodies whose incinerated remains are blended in these peeling glass vials, to know only how those bodies had died and nothing of how they had lived. In any case, there is no attempt to explain or to tell those stories at Martef HaShoah, which is the source of its power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these dark rooms were already a commentary on the futility, and even the perversity, of narrative.    These days, the memory of the catastrophe that we now call “the Holocaust” in English