View of "Shoah" exhibition, photo by Paweł Sawicki / Auschwitz Museum
After four years of preparation, the State Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau has opened a new exhibition in remembrance of the extermination of Jews. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Culture Bogdan Zdrojewski opened the Shoah exhibition on the 13th of June.
The work towards the preparation and realization of the new exhibition Shoah / Holocaust has lasted four years. The exhibition was prepared by the Jerusalem Institute for Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem. Situated in Block 27 at Auschwitz I, the exhibit occupies rooms telling different parts of the story and together offering an integrated narrative.
Avner Shalev, curator of the exhibition and director of Yad Vashem, stressed that the goal of the organizers was to address all aspects of the historic event. He said,
“A place like this is not about chronology. We understand that anyone who comes spends thirty minutes here. This exhibition calls on the visual sphere, so that visitors will make the most of it and leave thinking about what they have seen".
View of "Shoah" exhibition, photo by Paweł Sawicki / Auschwitz Museum
The exhibition is extremely ascetic in form and very modern in its use of multimedia. It begins with the words of Załmen Gradowski, a member of Sonderkommando, a special group of Jews forced by the Germans to burn the bodies of victims of gassing: “Come to me, you citizens of the free world. You, whose existence and security are guaranteed by human decency and law. Come and I will tell you how modern criminals and vile murderers crushed the decency of life and battled the right to existence.” It then opens with the text of the Jewish prayer Ani Maamim / I Believe, about faith in a better future.
The first room of the exhibition presents the Jewish world before the Holocaust. The viewer watches films and sees photographs from family archives – people at work, on vacation, at family celebrations. Shalev explains,
“We looked for these films all over Europe. We wanted visitors to see who the Jews were who lived here. They lived here before the war, almost 11 million, mostly in Poland”.
The next room approaches the birth of Nazism through statements made by leading figures in the Third Reich – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Julius Streicher. It also presents the discriminatory 1935 Nuremberg Laws passed to exclude people of non-Aryan origin from society. Here we see one of the main themes of the exhibition, as Shalev explains:
“Racist ideology, which was based on a racist anti-Semitic vision of the world, was the main driving force behind the destruction of the Jewish people. We want everyone to understand that we are talking about ideology! It is responsible for the extermination of 35 million people during the war".
View of "Shoah" exhibition, photo by Paweł Sawicki / Auschwitz Museum
The third room cannot reach the clamor of Nazi speeches, but it is a logical consequence of the previous room – the approach of the Holocaust. The main feature is a unique map, The Geography of Crime, which shows the notorious sites of murder. “There are more than 200 sites, where more than 6 million Jews were murdered,” says Shalev. Also presented are photographs of the deportation to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which was the main site of the killing and has become a symbol of the Holocaust. It was at Auschwitz II-Birkenau that Germans murdered about 1 million Jews, 200,000 of whom were children.
In the next room, the visitor learns the experience of victims and survivors. “You have to remember that these people wanted to live, if only for another day, but in the struggle for survival they never lost their humanity”, Shalev explains.
The youngest victims occupy a special place in the exhibition. Some 1.5 million Jewish children lost their lives during the war. The room dedicated to them leaves a lasting impression. On a white wall, Israeli artist Michal Rovner has applied the young victims’ drawings of fun, war, ghetto life and death. He says,
“Most of the children whose drawings are here were killed during the Shoah. One and a half million children were killed. It’s like we transgressed all limits of humanity. I wanted to show who they were. They must not get left behind as if wiped out from the world. I looked at these traces and here gave them a place to exist. In these drawings, there is on the one hand a happy world, and on the other, tragedy".
View of "Shoah" exhibition, photo by Paweł Sawicki / Auschwitz Museum
Similarly, the hall with the Book of Names makes a huge impression. On special cards are written the names of 4.2 million murdered Jews, from data collected by Yad Vashem. “We want to bring here the name of each slain person" Shalev says of the project. "We are constantly looking for more. In two years we should have a list of 5 million people".
The exhibition concludes with pictures of modern, multigenerational Jewish families - it’s a sort of return to life. “They decided not to hate and not to take revenge", the curator Shalev says. "We return to the prayer – ‘Ani Maamim.’ They want to believe that this is the future of man".
The exhibition rooms invite reflection and discussion.
This is not the first exhibition to be show at Block 27. That had been opened in 1968 for the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Ten years later it was modernized.
On Wednesday, Shalev said that under communism, there was no “historical truth in it. It was more what the authorities wanted to show. In those days, it was said that 4 million people were killed. There was no mention of the others they intended to kill.”
The International Auschwitz Council agreed in 2006 that Yad Vashem should lead the renovation of the exhibition. In January 2010, Shalev and Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the director at Auschwitz, signed a letter of intent to begin the realization of the new exhibition. Prior to installing the new exhibition, Block 27 was disassembled and underwent extensive maintenance work.
Germany established the camp at Auschwitz in 1940, initially to imprison Poles. The prison complex functioned as a network of sub-camps, and Auschwtiz II-Birkenau was built two years later, as a place of extermination of European Jews. There, the Germans killed at least 1.1 million people – mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities.
The former camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau became the site of a museum in 1947. A permanent exhibition was formed at the initiative of former prisoners, and opened in 1960. Exhibitions currently open include those of France, Poland, Russia, the Roma, Hungarian Jews, Slovaks and Czechs.
Source: PAP
Edited by mg 13.06.2013
Translated by Alena Aniskiewicz 14.06.2013