In 1939, Rudi Bamber arrived in Britain from Germany. He was sent to Britain by his family, who were frightened by the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazis for short who, one day, rounded up Jewish men in his town and herded them into a local football stadium. His father returned home a few hours later, shaken and ashen-faced, but he would not talk about what had happened to him. It was a long time after when Mr Bamber discovered that his father and the other Jewish men had been forced into a humiliating act. The Nazis had pushed the men to their knees and they were made to cut the grass on the football pitch with their teeth.
What Mr Bamber's father and the millions of Jews and other minorities suffered during the second World War now forms part of the first national exhibition on the Holocaust in Britain which opened recently at the Imperial War Museum in London.
The exhibition has taken four and a half years to create at a cost of £17 million sterling. On two floors of written, photographic, film and computer interactive material, the exhibition travels through the history of the Holocaust without tip-toeing around contentious issues.
As Anne Karpf, whose mother survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, once said, the way of telling the Holocaust story is as critical as the story itself. With that in mind, and a measure of fear that the organisers might pander to sensationalism, I walk through the grey doors of the entrance to the exhibition and back to 1933.
The first room is somewhat surprising. Unlike the major Holocaust museums in the US, in particular Washington's United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which offers visitors a personal "experience" by asking them to become directly involved in the displays, this exhibition encourages empathy through personal testimony.
So instead of being immediately faced with the destruction and horror of the suffering of millions, the first room, an oval wooden structure, celebrates the richness of Jewish life in Europe before Hitler's rise to power. In video testimonies, photographs and joyful bursts of traditional Jewish song, Yiddish culture and life are celebrated, giving a sense of the enormous loss and pain that were about to visit them.
Turning the corner into the main exhibition on the first floor, which deals with the period 1933 to 1939, provides the first shock. A powerful statement on the brown tiled wall reminds visitors that six million Jews and hundreds of thousands from other minorities were murdered using industrial methods.
Filmed evidence of book-burning in Germany, the painting of graffiti on Jewish-owned stores and written statements explaining the scapegoating of the Jews offer a historical perspective of pre-war Jewish persecution. All the while, Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, thunders through loudspeakers promising that "one day our patience will end. We'll shut their lying Jewish mouths".
On the first floor the exhibition rightly reminds the visitor that gays, gypsies, anti-fascists and the disabled also suffered as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Behind a glass box, photographs and documents yellow-tinged with age tell the story of Albrecht Becker, a designer from Wurzburg who was arrested in 1935 because he was gay. It is not known what happened to him.
Many will also be pleased that Britain's decision to turn its eyes away from the horror heaped upon Jews and minorities, even as late as 1943, is touched upon in the exhibition. There is a sense of catharsis here as well as a warning from history.
The true horror of the war is dealt with on the lower floor. Walking down the stairs into the period 1939 to 1945 is like descending into a terror whose facts are known, but are powerfully disturbing when seen at close quarters. Nothing can prepare you for rooms such as "The Final Solution" and "The Ghettos".
On the black walls of the darkened room of the Final Solution elaborate diagrams show how responsibility for the Holocaust threaded its way through a web of secret and not-so-secret Nazi agencies throughout Europe. From the darkness of the Final Solution, through a mock-up of the cattle trains which brought Jews, Gypsies, gays, black people and the disabled to concentration camps, I move into the light.
But it is a false dawn. A Jewish couple, neither of whom seem more than 40 years old, embrace each other as they look at a massive snow-covered model of Auschwitz. On chairs at the side of the model, people sit listening to the voices of survivors speaking about the humiliation, the suffering and the screaming mothers and fathers who were separated from their children. Even those who managed to escape the gas chambers burned the bodies of their loved ones as their jailers forced them to destroy the evidence of the Nazi killing machine.
Respite from the horror is provided in the final room where visitors are invited to reflect on what they have seen and heard.
There were many children at the exhibition. And as one schoolgirl, Christine, said: "We have been learning about war at school. But it is completely different when you come to an exhibition like this and can see it for yourself. It made me think about other wars since the second World War and whether we have really helped people in the same situation. I don't think so."
Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1 020 74165374; www.iwm.org.uk