Unique exhibit to commemorate Auschwitz liberation

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

As the world pauses to remember the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz, the Holocaust Council of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey will put the finishing touches on a unique testimonial to survivors of Nazi genocide and those who helped liberate them.

The exhibition, From Memory to History, opening officially on Thursday, Jan. 27, will tell the stories of those caught up in the Nazi nightmare in words, pictures, artifacts, and living recollections at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus, Whippany.

It is a concept Holocaust Council director Barbara Wind began developing five years ago, “not telling of the Holocaust as facts but as human stories.” She describes it as “using first-person accounts, photographs, stories, and memorabilia to tell their stories in images — survivors, liberators, and POWs — from people living in the MetroWest area.”

“People remember personal stories more than they remember dates and events,” said Wind.

The juxtaposition of the exhibit and the 60th-anniversary commemoration was coincidental. But, said Wind, liberation was “the beginning of the end” of a dark moment in world history, as prisoners by the tens of thousands were forced marched by retreating Nazis to German concentration camps.

And yet, said Wind, “there were still months of torment” until captive Jews, Gypsies, and political prisoners were finally freed from internment.

Her concept for the exhibition began germinating when she met Evelyn Panish, a German-born survivor, during the Anne Frank exhibit at the Aidekman campus in November 2000.

“She came with a black bag of family photographs that depicted her family’s life in Berlin until they fled to Shanghai in 1938, then resettled in America after World War II.”

Panish and her husband, Morton, who now live in Maine, arranged the well-composed photos and dry-mounted them on poster board as the first of 50 montages to be put on display at the campus’ Weill Atrium.

“It has evolved into a museum-quality exhibit,” said Wind, whose second-floor office has grown cluttered with shelves and a supermarket shopping cart stuffed with memorabilia that include much more than photographs.

Some are grim evidence of the Nazi cruelty that turned the sacred into the profane — a banjo and a drum, an envelope, insoles from a pair of shoes — all made with the Hebrew-lettered parchment of Torah scrolls.

The late Philip Newman of Short Hills had collected many of the items. An orthopedic surgeon with a keen interest in the Holocaust, he had purchased some of them from World War II American veterans, Wind said.

“One thing that soldiers do is loot. They acquire trophies,” said Wind. “There was one particular American soldier who was living in Florida, one of the liberators who decided — ‘why just trash the stuff? I might as well take it.’ There was so much of it.”

The exhibits will include simple household items carried by deported prisoners en route to their unknowing extermination.

“I have a meat grinder, I have pots. People brought their pots to Auschwitz because they did not know they were going to a death camp. They thought they were going to a work camp and would need these items so they could live normal lives. We have a woman’s apron. We have a child’s jacket, a doll’s dress and bonnet, uniforms from Jews and political prisoners, and a patched-up blanket.”

To Wind, one memento — a wood carving containing faces cut carefully from round wooden dowels and mounted on a six-inch square base — seemed to hold a special fascination.

“It is a sculpture done in the Lodz Ghetto, which speaks to the human need for art. It looks like it was made from leftover dowels at a carpenter’s shop done in the early 1940s. In a very eerie way there were six carved figures — as if they would represent the six million.”

In front of the six faces is the tiny wooden replica of an open book, its pages inscribed with the figures 5700 and 5701, indicating a work begun 65 years ago.
“When I look at these artifacts it is very difficult,” Wind said. “These things have been in my office for a couple of months now, but it is very hard to touch them or even look at them without being moved because you know there is a story, a terrible story, behind every one of them.”

The exhibit’s official opening at 3 p.m. on Jan. 30 will begin with a keynote speech by William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology and Judaic studies at CUNY Graduate Center and City College of New York and author of The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest.

Harpist Beth Robinson and singer Elana Safar will present musical selections.

Harry Reicher, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a member of the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will speak on Feb. 6; Stephen Schwartz will build a lego replica of the Warsaw Ghetto on Sunday, Feb. 13, from 9:30 to noon; and Warren Grover, past president of the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest and author of Nazis in Newark, will address a special program on Feb. 20.

Before it is packed up to become a traveling display to local venues, the exhibit will end March 7 with a conference for educators.

They will be able to meet the authors — survivors, liberators, and prisoners of war — who have published their memoirs. One of them, said Wind, was a small boy whose parents brought him to America from Germany.

“His grandmother stayed behind and wrote a letter to her son called, ‘Fate Did Not Let Me Go.’ The grandson found that letter 50 years later and published it as a book.

“I want people to get the importance of preserving this history, preserving this legacy. We have lost so much already and we are losing more every day, because the survivors are passing and the liberators are passing. Some are just beginning to speak. Each story is unique. Each story is one small piece of a very vast and complex puzzle. The more stories, the better our understanding of the Holocaust and the better we can teach it.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njewishnews.com.