PAWEL SAWICKI/AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
STATE MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM,
COURTESY MUSEALIA
views
essay
Holocaust Horrors
Auschwitz on tour stands to be a powerful teaching tool.
T
ROBERT SKLAR
Contributing
Editor
U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
TOP LEFT:
A prisoner’s
eyeglasses found
at Auschwitz.
TOP MIDDLE: A shoe
and a sock from a
child imprisoned
at Auschwitz.
TOP RIGHT: A
German SS officer’s
belt buckle with an
Auschwitz past.
here’s intriguing merit in
Poland’s plans to stage a
first-ever international trav-
eling exhibit of 600 original arti-
facts from the Auschwitz network
of concentration and death camps
operated by Nazi Germany during
World War II.
The long-planned tour of 14 cit-
ies in Europe and North America,
timely amid swelling anti-Jewish
sentiment, will remind older gen-
erations and teach younger ones
about just how maniacal and sav-
age the ruling Third Reich truly
was in “the womb of the most
technologically advanced society
of its time.”
Cities to be visited will be
announced soon. The tour will
range seven years. It will supple-
ment, not replace, the amazing
work of permanent Holocaust
memorials, including the Detroit
Jewish community’s Holocaust
Memorial Center. HMC wasn’t an
initial applicant, but indicates it
would consider being a future host
if a scaled-down version of the
up to 27,000-square-foot exhibit
were offered, the presentation cost
proved affordable and HMC’s tem-
porary exhibit space worked.
With the number of survivors
dwindling daily, the exhibit tour,
titled “Not Long Ago, Not Far
Away,” is positioned to be an out-
sized attempt to illuminate the
Holocaust and its goal of destroy-
ing European Jewry.
Spreading the story of
NAZI MINDSET
In a photo important to understanding the derangement
of the Third Reich, German SS officers and guards laugh
and joke en route to or returning from Solahutte, a Nazi
military retreat outside Auschwitz. The photo is from
the personal scrapbook of Karl Hocker, adjutant to the
commandant of the German death camp in Poland. In
2007, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum received
the historically significant scrapbook, showing Nazi
insouciance in 1944 during the Holocaust.
8
September 14 • 2017
jn
Auschwitz will immensely ben-
efit the Jewish world in help-
ing reinforce the cry for “Never
Again.” The tour will help expose
our impressionable youth to the
seminal story of genocidal hatred,
notwithstanding Western growth
in studying the Holocaust.
Between 1940 and 1945, the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum esti-
mates, Auschwitz, outside Krakow,
brutally sounded the death knell
for 1.1 million people: 960,000
Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles,
21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet pris-
oners of war and 12,000 others,
including people who were homo-
sexual or who had a disability.
MONEY GRABBING?
Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Memorial and Museum is located
in Oswiecim, a Polish town that
was 60 percent Jewish before
the war. The institution caused
gasps among some Jews when it
announced the 14-city artifacts
tour more than 72 years after
U.S.-led Allied forces liberated the
camps of Auschwitz.
Exhibit and museum organizers
quickly sought to allay concerns
that admission fees would fleece
tour visitors as opposed to help-
ing cover travel and display costs
and provide a defensible stream
of income to reach a wider audi-
ence. The hallowed grounds of the
largest and most-publicized death
camp won’t be desecrated by a
profiteering scheme once the $1.5
million exhibit goes on tour by year
end in Madrid, organizers vow.
Students will be admitted free.
Tour organizers acknowledge
nothing can replace an actual visit
to Auschwitz to sense the magni-
tude of Hitler’s fury. But as Piotr
Cywinski, museum director, said
in announcing the tour, the exhibit
“can become a great warning cry
for us all against building the
future on hatred, racism, anti-Sem-
itism and bottomless contempt for
another human being.”
The Spanish family-owned com-
pany Musealia, curator of a Titanic
artifacts exhibit, is the Auschwitz
exhibit’s project director.
Examples of what will be shown
on tour include a pair of eyeglass-
es worn by an Auschwitz prisoner,
an original German-made Model
2 transport train, an original bar-
rack from a sub-camp, a German
SS officer’s belt buckle, a tin with
deadly Zyklon-B pesticide crys-
tals and a wooden box carved by
another prisoner.
TOUR THEMES
Exhibit-goers are bound to expe-
rience deepened empathy, says
Robin Axelrod, director of edu-
cation at our local HMC. As she
told the JN: “While photographs
can certainly be
powerful, seeing
a pair of shat-
tered glasses that
someone once
wore provides
the visitor with a
more immediate
connection with
the object and, by
Robin Axelrod
extension, to the
individual who
wore them.
“We are left to wonder about
the back story: ‘Why are the
glasses broken? Who wore them?
Where did the person come from?’
And we wonder about the fate of
the person behind them. Did she
or he survive? Is there anyone
alive today who knew that person
and can tell us about the life the
person led?”
Axelrod, ever adding insight to
lessons of the Holocaust, remind-
ed that each victim had a name,
a face and hopes and dreams —
“just like we all do.”
“The Holocaust,” she said, “can-
not be viewed as six million Jews,
but rather as the murder of indi-
vidual Jews six million times.
“It is also important to remem-
ber that while 1.1 million people,
mostly Jews, were killed in
Auschwitz, there were thousands
of other killing sites throughout
Europe. The people who perished
in those places also need their
stories told.”
Most of the artifacts going on
tour belong to the Auschwitz
Memorial Collections. Some
objects are on loan from Yad
Vashem-World Holocaust
Remembrance Center in
Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington,
private collections, other muse-
ums and survivors.
SHARED HEADLINE
The July 26 announcement of the
tour came 2½ weeks before anti-
Jewish and racially charged hatred
descended upon Charlottesville, Va.
A counter-protestor was killed
and 19 others were injured in
a violent clash triggered by an
Aug. 12 rally organized by white
supremacist, neo-Nazi, Ku Klux
Klan and white nationalist sym-
pathizers marching against city
plans to remove a publicly dis-
played statue of Confederate Gen.
Robert E. Lee. Two state troopers
monitoring the situation died in a
helicopter crash.
In an emboldening act two days
later, U.S. President Donald Trump
inexplicably and inexorably placed
parallel blame for the violence in
Charlottesville on the Jew-haters
and racists who led the protest
and the counter-protestors, largely
there to resist the hatred, but
unfortunately tainted by some vio-
lence-seeking anarchist extremists
tied to the Antifa movement.
Two days after that, Aug. 17, the
museum at Auschwitz tweeted in a
message left open to interpretation
and posted in several languages:
“One of the hardest lessons for us
today: Perpetrators were people.
They accepted an ideology that
rationalized and promoted hatred
& evil.”
Beneath those words: a photo
of Auschwitz-stationed German
SS officers and guards smiling and
playful (see Nazi Mindset), seem-
ingly unmoved by Third Reich
orders to mindlessly kill.
On Aug. 20, according to the
Associated Press, the museum at
Auschwitz again took to Twitter,
adding clarity to its earlier tweet
by suggesting the death camp
memorial stands today not only
“as a painful reminder” of what
racist and anti-Jewish ideologies
can lead to, but also “of what may
happen when people hate.”
Understanding the intersection
of how Auschwitz came to be and
what it means for our worldview
today is central to the artifacts
tour. Such understanding also is
critical to appreciating why there
could not possibly be moral equiv-
alency between Charlottesville
marchers bound by ethnic and
racist hatred and those among the
counter-protestors who were non-
violent and drawn by such core
American ideals as liberty, equal-
ity and justice.
That’s a thought to ponder as
the High Holidays near.
L’shanah tovah tikatevu. May you
be inscribed for a good year. •