Museum exhibit puts horrific realities of the Holocaust on display
If only those who deny the Holocaust would go down to Battery Park. For here is proof that the horror happened — in more than 400 photos and 700 objects, some as small as a child’s toy, others as large as the freight car that carried hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to their deaths.
All bear testimony to the hell that was Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps. And rather than go to Poland to see its atrocities, you’ll find them at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, home to “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not Far Away.” Opening May 8, this traveling exhibition chronicles the slow but steady rise from hate speech to outright genocide. It’s a message that, amid fresh attacks on mosques and synagogues, is all too relevant.
“Auschwitz didn’t start with the gas chambers,” exhibition director Luis Ferreiro tells The Post. “It started with hateful words and small acts.”
As we see here, those acts started in post-World War I Germany. Photos show the boycotting of Jewish businesses, and posters put up in schools detailed the differences between blond “German boys” and dark-eyed “Jewboys.”
Soon after, we see the yellow stars and pink triangles that marked Jews and homosexuals; the striped uniforms of the slave laborers; and concrete posts threaded with the barbed, electrical wire that prevented their escape. Later come the blueprints for the crematoriums, sometimes so packed that laborers at the camp simply burned bodies in open pits, photos of which we see here, along with the boots of a Nazi doctor whose job it was to select from those newly shoved out onto Auschwitz’s train platform who would work and who would die.
“Auschwitz didn’t start with the gas chambers.”
So many of the prisoners’ belongings will remain anonymous: that crushed red pump, tossed with thousands of other shoes stripped from the new arrivals; the countless broken eyeglasses; the battered suitcases, emptied of valuables and tossed in the trash. One of the most heartbreaking pieces here is a child’s shoe, a tiny sock stuffed inside it, found at the entrance to a gas chamber.
Still other objects speak to people’s ingenuity and resilience: a small chess set one prisoner hid inside a sardine can; the tin engagement ring a woman kept hidden, sometimes under her tongue, all through her imprisonment. On display here, too, are the padded socks, now the color of tea, that a Jewish mother made for her daughter just before a Catholic family hid the girl.
Not only did those socks keep 8-year-old Aurelia Gamzen’s feet warm, they muffled the footsteps that could have given her away.
Along with all those objects are the journal writings, drawings and haunting recorded testimony of survivors. One woman says the first thing she remembers from her arrival at Auschwitz was sitting in a chair as her head was shaved, her falling hair mingling with her tears. A man recalls the tattoo he was given, and being told that he no longer had a name, just the numbers on his arm: 5143. But he, like so many others, refused to believe that.
Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, just some 200,000 survived, only to be forced into other camps. When Allied forces finally arrived, 7,000 remained.
“What the Nazis wanted to do to the Jewish people was to erase their memory, and leave no trace they existed,” Ferreiro says.
Their memory, despite all the lengths taken to extinguish it, lives on in this exhibition.