Last Monday marked the launch of a Web site designed to help people find out whether American galleries and museums hold art that was, or could have been, stolen by the Nazis -- and if so, which institutions hold what. It was an occasion that, like the comparable moment more than three years ago when Germany launched its own "Lost Art" Web site, prompted a certain wonderment.
Nearly six decades after the Holocaust, it is amazing how often the memory of it floats up -- how close it still is to the surface of ordinary life. No matter how much bloodshed has stained the intervening years, and there have been atrocities to spare, the Holocaust retains its power to fascinate and horrify. It has not yet been put behind us.
The evidence of this is everywhere. And it's not just a matter of museums, although the three major ones, in Jerusalem, Berlin and Washington, D.C., continue to draw enormous numbers of visitors even in an era of declining museum attendance. There are also movies (think of last year's Oscar-winning "The Pianist"). There are books (this year saw the "critical edition" of the perennially popular "Diary of Anne Frank," and just a few years ago Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" was a worldwide best seller).