Gabion: Libeskind in Osnabruck - The Felix Nussbaum Museum 1/3

My guide was taking me through the affluent inner suburbs of Osnabruck in Northern Germany. Here - a car park today - was where the synagogue stood until it was burnt down on Hitler's infamous Kristallnacht of 1938. There was the old Nazi headquarters. Dispassionately he recounted how people were pulled onto the streets and beaten, flung into the river, deported to the death camps. How the local Roman Catholic bishop turned a blind eye. How the city centre was later bombed to bits by the Allies.

After the war, it seemed, nobody talked about all this for a quarter of a century as they got on with rebuilding. But since the 1970s, Osnabruck has been coming to terms with its past. And now the final act of contrition has been made: the opening of the Felix Nussbaum Museum.

It is the first building to be completed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, a former avant-garde composer and musician who has leapt to world prominence in his early fifties with his unique, angular, style. The ever-cheerful manner of Libeskind - a jolly, round-faced intellectual with a shock of now greying hair - belies the serious and symbolic nature of his buildings. Libeskind has finally nearly finished his Jewish Museum in his adopted home city of Berlin. He has a companion Jewish museum in San Francisco to do, and two much-delayed British projects - the Cubist "spiral" of his extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and a new Imperial War Museum in Manchester, which will take the form of fragments of a shattered globe. Libeskind, always aware of the effect of the Holocaust on his own Jewish family, however brings a particular consciousness to the Felix Nussbaum Museum. It is about memory and loss, as he points out, but it is also about the future.

Nussbaum, a son of Osnabruck, was an artist of some fame while still remarkably young: exhibitions and critical approval followed him right up to 1933, when the Nazis came to power while he was studying in Rome. His portraits, landscapes and cityscapes, done in a vigorous, naïve style, were compared with Vincent van Gogh and Henri Rousseau. Unable to return home because of his Jewishness, he settled in Brussels. His personal tragedy began in 1940 when, as the Germans invaded, he was arrested as a "hostile alien" by the Belgians and sent to a squalid concentration camp in the south of France. He escaped, found his way back to Belgium, and went into hiding in 1942. He was captured by the Wehrmacht in 1944 and sent to his death in Auschwitz. He was 40. The paintings from 1940 onwards became an artist's chronicle of the bleakness engendered by the Holocaust.