What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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The exhibition also includes loans from more than 20 museums, institutions and private collections from all over the world, Ferreiro clarifies, and although it will continue to tour for several years in other countries after the Kansas City engagement ends in January 2022, "it is in its own nature to come to an end." "The artifacts belong to permanent collections of different museums and, therefore, the exhibition cannot be accommodated into a permanent home," he says. "That is why we insist in every city to take advantage of the unique opportunity it means to be able to encounter these objects and the narrative of the exhibition. I encourage [everyone] to take a courage step and visit the exhibition." The Exhibition George Guastello, president and chief executive of Union Station, reminds exhibit goers that displaced people have often walked the hallways of what was once the grand hub for railroad travel in the Midwest, as did statesmen like Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower and troops leaving to defend America in World War II. Rather than just a story of horror, he says, "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." is about people, "the perpetrators and the prisoners, and the juxtaposition of their stories." "Now it is our goal to ensure it never happens again," Guastello says. "We always had a feeling that the story would resonate. But I have been so humbled by the response in the community. What better time for this exhibition than when we see what's happening in our world today? It speaks to the souls of the people. We're on a mission, not to sell tickets but to change the world one person at a time. I am humbled to even be in the presence of what [Luis Ferreiro] created." The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education is a partner in the exhibition, and CHE Executive Director Jessica Rockhold says having the Holocaust artifacts in Kansas City is "incredibly significant and an unprecedented opportunity." "The importance of an exhibition like 'Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.' cannot be overstated," Rockhold said in a September 2020 story in The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. "Most people will never have the opportunity to travel to Auschwitz and other Holocaust sites. This exhibit offers access to those precious artifacts that personalize and make tangible the history we learn in books." "Nothing can replace a visit to the authentic site of the biggest crime of the 20th century," Dr. Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, said in the same story in The Chronicle. "But this exhibition can become a great warning cry for us all and allow people who may never get the chance to visit an opportunity to see and experience it like never before." The Experience According to The Chronicle, the exhibit "explores the dual identity of the camp as a physical location — the largest documented mass murder site in human history — and as a symbol of the borderless manifestation of hatred and human barbarity." Among the 700 artifacts included in the exhibition are hundreds of personal items — such as suitcases, eyeglasses and shoes — that belonged to survivors and victims of Auschwitz, The Chronicle catalogs. Other artifacts include concrete posts that were part of the fence of the Auschwitz camp; fragments of an original barrack for prisoners from the Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp; a desk and other possessions of the first and the longest serving Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss; a gas mask used by the SS, Hitler's elite guard; Picasso's lithograph "Head of the Auschwitz prisoner"; and an original German-made Model 2 freight wagon used for the deportation of Jews to the ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Poland. But perhaps more important is information about what The Chronicle calls "the development of Nazi ideology and the transformation of Auschwitz from an ordinary Polish town known as Oswiecim to the most significant Nazi site of the Holocaust — at which approximately 1 million Jews, and tens of thousands of others, were murdered." The Chronicle points out that victims were not only Jews but political prisoners, Roma (also known as Gypsies), Soviet POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses and anyone the Nazis labeled as "homosexual," "disabled," "criminal" or "inferior." Mike Shores, writing in the July 24, 2021, edition of the Joplin (Mo.) Globe, says the impact of the exhibit came home to him with three artifacts — a heavy door with a viewing hole, used to see if the prisoners in the gas chamber were dead yet; a cage from inside the gas chamber into which the poison pellets were dropped, enclosed so prisoners could not try to stop the fatal gas; and "the well-made shoe of a child about 4 years old." "It was," he writes, "excavated from the ruins of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, though it could have come from any number of such camps. Carefully placed inside the shoe was a sock. It was found this way. Perhaps the mother or a thoughtful child had placed it there to ensure it did not get lost, so they could put it back on when they returned from their 'shower.' By this time, the mother was probably beginning to doubt that they would be coming back. But she carefully shielded her child from reality, and placed the shoes and other items carefully beneath their numbered coat hook." "Each object in the exhibition is unique," says Ferreiro, director of "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." "They are all fragments of history and each one of them has its own echo. It is fascinating to see how visitors establish different relationships with them. For many, personal items from the victims — little shoes, glasses, suitcases, mirrors — are profoundly touching. Their nature helps them easily identify with them. And for others, iconic objects will become the ones that get to them: posts from the camp, a section of a barrack, elements from the perpetrators …. "It is impossible to predict which one will be more powerful for each one of us," he concludes. "I can only say that we present them in a way that allows each object to speak for itself, to tell their story. And, whenever possible, we identify the original owner. The authenticity that the objects bring makes the exhibition a very personal experience for visitors, and an invitation for reflection." JANUARY 2-8, 2022 WHAT'S UP! 39 Auschwitz Continued From Page 7 YEAR IN REVIEW UPDATE "Popular" seems an awkward word to describe the reaction to an exhibit that chronicles the deaths of at least 1 million people at the Auschwitz camp complex, the largest of the Holocaust, established in 1940 in the Polish city called Oswiecim. But the reaction to "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away," which opened June 14, 2021, at Union Station in Kansas City, Mo., has been so overwhelming that the exhibit has been extended from its origi- nal end date of Jan. 30 to continue through March 20. The Holocaust, as defined by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 across Europe and North Africa. The height of the persecution and murder occurred during the context of World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had killed nearly two out of every three Euro- pean Jews. It is estimated that Hitler's elite SS and police deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and 1945. Of these deportees, approx- imately 1.1 million people were murdered. According to a nationwide survey released in September 2020 and touted as the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Gener- ation Z, the Holocaust needs to be remem- bered: • Just 90% of respondents said they believed that the Holocaust happened. • 63% of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. • More than half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. • Half of U.S. respondents could not name a single concentration camp, and 56% were unable to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau. • One in 10 respondents did not recall ever having heard the word "Holocaust" before. • 11% of respondents believed Jews caused the Holocaust. • 30% reported having seen Nazi symbols on social media or in their communities within the past five years. The survey, titled the U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, was conducted by the Confer- ence on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Read more at claimscon.org/ millennial-study/ and find out more about the Kansas City exhibit at https://union- station.org/event/auschwitz/