What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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The Conception "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." features more than 700 original artifacts, 400 photographs and unpublished memoirs, many of which have never been available to the public. The idea for the exhibition started with Ferreiro, whose family founded an exhibition company called Musealia 21 years ago in their home country of Spain. It is the only career Ferreiro, who was born in 1982, has ever known. "It has been an incredible journey full of learning and creativity, that gave us also the chance to work with the best professionals in the different topics we created exhibitions about," he says. "From historians to architects, conservators or designers, leading groups of very talented individuals into a vision for a particular exhibition has been an incredible experience." Everything changed for the family when Luis' brother Jesus died of a sudden heart attack in 2008 at the age of 26. "One year later, in April in 2009, I was given for my birthday the book 'Man in Search of Meaning' by Viktor Frankl," Ferreiro remembers. "Although it took me some months to make the decision to read it, I did so that summer, and I was profoundly touched by the way he narrates his experience of being deported to several Nazi camps, specially Auschwitz. The moment I closed the book, I felt an urgency to create an exhibition that would explain the story of Auschwitz — somehow, to take Auschwitz to the world. To do something. "The story of creating the exhibition is full of pain — for the subject matter and the relationship to my brother — but it is also a sincere story of gratitude," he adds. "It would be impossible to name all the institutions and individuals who decided to come together to make the exhibition possible. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is not only the co-producer of the exhibition, but also the source of most of the original objects displayed. And as important as that, they made available their expertise, historical research and knowledge." 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 SEPTEMBER 12-18, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 9 FYI The Holocaust 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 collab- orators 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 collabora- tors had killed nearly two out of every three European Jews. The largest of its kind, the Auschwitz camp complex, the museum website explains, was established in 1940 in the Polish city called Oswiecim. 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 deport- ees, approximately 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 Generation Z: • 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 Holo- caust. • 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 percent 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 Knowl- edge and Awareness Survey, was conducted by the Confer- ence on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Read more at claimscon.org/millennial-study/ The "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." exhibition includes 700 artifacts from the concentration camp. (Pawel Sawicki, Auschwitz Memorial) See Auschwitz Page 10