By Etta Sanders

For the past 20 years museum consultant Alice Greenwald has focused her time and talents on memorializing a horrific, world-wrenching event. Now she is about to take on another.

In April, Greenwald will leave her job as the associate director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to become the director of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum.

		The WTC Memorial Foundation received 35 resumes for the position. Gretchen Dykstra, the foundation's president and CEO, said that one of the qualities that stood out about Greenwald was her "clarity of telling the story truthfully, while never forgetting that it was evil." In a telephone interview with the Trib last month, Greenwald talked about her new job and how her work with the Holocaust Museum has prepared her to tell the story of the country's worst terrorist attack. Both events, she said, marked a break in history. "There was before 9/11 and there was after 9/11," she said.

The first step toward creating content for the museum will be to determine its message, she said, and more than any other, the story here is one of memory and loss.

"All I know is we have nearly 3,000 lives that were lost because they got up in the morning and went to work. That's what we have to talk about."

Greenwald brings to the job the experience of working with victims and survivors. But how much input and control will the family members of the victims have?

"You can't do this in isolation from the people who were most affected by it. They will have a privileged voice," she said. "But that doesn't necessarily mean they will have the final vote."

From a curator's point of view, Greenwald said, there are two big differences between the events portrayed in the Holocaust Museum and the terrorist attacks. Because the Sept. 11 events were seen around the world on television, less explanation about what happened is required. The more profound difference, she said, is that the World Trade Center museum will be on the ground where the tragedy occurred.

"That it's a space where people died gives you a different obligation. It has to honor those who died."

Greenwald said it is too soon to know which specific artifacts will be displayed. This month she will make her first visit to Hangar 17 at JFK Airport, where the large remnants of the towers and several damaged rescue vehicles are stored.

The museum will also want to collect and catalogue documentary material, such as photographs and films, from the surrounding neighborhood. "It's what we call in the holocaust business ‘rescuing the evidence,'" she said.

Greenwald worked at Washington's Holocaust Museum nearly from its inception in 1986. She said her experiences in helping to create that institution will help her confront the problems that are likely to arise in her new job. "It's not to say the answers will be the same, but I think I know which questions to ask."

One of those questions will be how to treat very graphic material and show disturbing photographs without offending the viewer.

"These are the kinds of conversations we have when we are developing exhibitions," Greenwald said. "What are the boundaries? What can you do? We are a memorial space. What don't you do in a memorial space?"

The Holocaust Museum, for instance, recommends that children under the age of 11 not view the permanent exhibits. Some materials, such as those with nudity, are shown behind a privacy wall. "You don't want to run the risk of violating the memory of the dead or crossing a boundary with those who are suffering or grieving," Greenwald said.

Why is she leaving a job she loves to leap into a process that is a magnet for controversy?

"I don't think I would have thought to leave the Holocaust Museum if it were not for a project that had the potential to be as morally significant," she said. "We have the opportunity to do that if it's done right. And it has to be done right. There's too much at stake."