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Nine-year-old Daniel lives in a cheery home with bright yellow wallpaper. He bakes cookies in a kitchen with a pale pink stove, rides his bike and plays with a toy train. He comes from a loving family.

Soon, however, Daniel's world will explode. The Nazis will come to power and Daniel will be forced to wear a yellow star on his coat. He will eat muddy turnip soup in a dingy, crowded room in the Lodz Ghetto. He will be deported to Auschwitz on a packed train. His mother and his sister Erika will be murdered.

"Remember the Children, Daniel's Story," an admission-free interactive children's installation opening Sunday at the Herbst International Exhibition Hall in San Francisco, takes viewers step by step through Daniel's dark odyssey.

The Bay Area is the first community in the nation to house the exhibit, a traveling version of an award-winning permanent installation at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Viewers won't merely read about the young boy's experiences on cue cards. They will walk down an almost life-size tree-lined path in a small mock German town to a model of his home. Inside, they will hear the telephone ringing, and children playing outside. At the end of a hallway, they will see a cabinet filled with Judaica — Shabbat candlesticks and kiddush cups.

They will sit on a yellow park bench emblazoned with the words "Only for Jews!" They will open and close the suitcase that follows Daniel from home to the concentration camp, and touch a reproduction of the barbed wire that surrounds the complex — though the replica has no sharp points.

Based on experiences of children who survived the Holocaust and wrote about it later, the 5,000-square-foot installation reproduces the 1933 to 1945 era in intricate detail, from the sports gear that fills Daniel's closet to the desserts displayed in a window of the town bakery to the rules posted on the ghetto walls.

Photos, videos and historic artifacts add to the realism, as do excerpts from Daniel's diary, a composite of writings by children who survived the Holocaust.

"Nothing is made up," says Susan Morgenstein, curator of "Daniel's Story" for the Holocaust museum. "Everything is authentic. It comes from the children of the time."

But realistic as it is, the exhibit — meant for children ages 8 and above — has been prepared with an eye to young viewers' sensitivities.

Created by historians and educators and reviewed by experts including child psychiatrists, the exhibit lets visitors know in advance what they will see and hear.

And at the outset they are informed that unlike more than a million children who perished in the Shoah, Daniel survives to tell his story. They are led up to but not through the Auschwitz gate, where a filmstrip reveals what happens to Daniel and his family.

"We neither want to sentimentalize, nor do we want to scare," Morgenstein says.

The final two areas of the exhibition — which is being mounted in collaboration with the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito — provide an opportunity for visitors to ask questions about what they have seen and express their thoughts and feelings.

"Daniel: Even though you struggled and life was hard for you, you taught us all something," one young visitor to the exhibit wrote in a postcard.

Wrote another, "Dear Daniel: You are very brave. I am very sorry about what happened. I will remember what happened."

That, of course, is the goal of the exhibit, which was originally produced by the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C., and was installed as a permanent exhibition in the Holocaust museum in 1993. Since then, it has become one of the museum's most popular installations.

The circuit of "Daniel's Story" is among activities marking the museum's fifth anniversary. Its presence here is made possible by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.

"We wanted to tell a simple moral tale with a begining, middle and end," Morgenstein says. "We wanted to make sure to tell a whole history."

To enhance the educational impact of "Daniel's Story," the Bay Area Discovery Museum has planned a panoply of public programs to coincide with the exhibit's local presentation. Among those will be Holocaust-related films, lectures by survivors and educators, and workshops on such topics as "Teaching Children about Tolerance." Performances addressing topics such as race relations, violence and ancestry are also scheduled.

More than 2,500 school groups have already signed up to view "Daniel's Story," according to Bonnie Pitman, executive director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum. She firmly believes the installation is an important exhibit for our times.

"These injustices go on today," she says. "Children and adults of all ages need to be reminded that individual acts affect people in positive and negative ways."