A new museum will open in 2008 in the heart of Warsaw's wartime ghetto to tell the story of Europe's largest Jewish community before it was wiped out by the Nazis, the project's director said on Monday. 

After a 10-year struggle for funding, Poland's government and Jewish groups agreed to build the US$30-million museum in a square next to the Warsaw Ghetto memorial.

It will trace several centuries of Jewish history in Poland and pay homage to famous Polish-born Jews including director Roman Polanski, film producer Samuel Goldwyn and Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

The building, designed by little-known Finnish architects Ilmari Lahdelma and Rainer Mahlamaki, will have an austere blue-glass exterior encasing a red, cave-like structure meant to symbolize Moses' parting of the Red Sea.

"Many of the designs were spectacular from the outside, but we also wanted something that had a magical interior," said project director and historian Jerzy Halbersztadt.

"This design is open, it draws people in."

Twelve years after Steven Spielberg's Holocaust film Schindler's List brought the southern city of Krakow worldwide fame, thousands of tourists come to Poland annually to visit the often well-preserved ruins of former Nazi German camps.

Poland's Jewish community numbered 3 million residents before Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the country in 1939.

It is estimated that up to 20,000 remain. Studies for the museum project say it should attract up to half a million visitors annually.

(China Daily July 6, 2005)