The hall had an eerie ambience, a sullen atmosphere, a feeling of permeating sorrow and smudged rage. Hitler had written in Mien Kampf, "Cruelty impresses. People want to be afraid of something. They want some one to whom they can submit with a shudder. The masses need that. They need something to dread." He ruthlessly translated his ideas into action. Fatal human malice and perversion are what it takes to make a monster.

Next to the hall were photographs of pyramids of corpses in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibar, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenan. It was frightening to see photographic evidence of the hanging and beheading of Jews in synagogues, the rupture of their systems with water torture and mutilated bodies. In Yad-Vashem, even the atmosphere of that age has been authentically preserved.

Hitler wanted to make the country Judenfrei (Free of Jews). In this connection, and incident involving Hitler’s favourite actress, Leni Riefestahl, is worth mentioning. She had come to Lodz with a roving camera crew soon after the city fell. She saw a line of praying Jews executed with automatic weapons. She went straight to the Furher and told him that this was bad publicity for the Reich. Orders were then passed that the ‘sub-human’ population (Jews) should be disposed of at anonymous sites in central Europe and adequate disposal facilities were provided for the purpose.

In that hour of darkness, there were Germans who came to the aid of Jews and, at the cost of their personal safety, saved a large number of them. Outside Yad-Vashem, there are trees planted in their memory. One of the trees has been planted in memory of Oskar Schindler, who used his influence to save a large number of Jews.

The atmosphere of the place is overwhelming. When Pope John Paul II visited Yad-Vashem, he remarked, "Here the mind, the heart and the soul feel an extreme need for silence."