In ‘Seeing Auschwitz’ exhibit, the power is in the details
In ‘Seeing Auschwitz’ exhibit, the power is in the details
The 'Seeing Auschwitz' exhibit is on display at the VAPA Center in uptown Charlotte through April 15
The following article appeared in the March 23, 2024 edition of the Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
‘Seeing Auschwitz’ is a challenging, timely reminder shown through the faces of victims and perpetrators
More than 12,000 people, including 6,000 students, have come through “Seeing Auschwitz” so far, according to Judy LaPietra, associate director of the Greenspon Center, who was the driving force behind getting the exhibit to Charlotte. “It is appropriate for the time that we’re living in. We’re seeing unprecedented attempts to undo the historical records of the Holocaust,” LaPietra said. (Ledger photo)
by Cristina Bolling
You enter an exhibit about the Holocaust prepared for certain certainties: to struggle with how humanity created — and allowed — one of the greatest atrocities of the modern age. To feel anger. To feel sorrow. To worry that such a thing could happen again.
A visit to “Seeing Auschwitz,” an exhibit now on display at the VAPA Center in uptown, inspires all of those feelings. But it also invites us to slow down and see beyond photographs, to examine what seem like the ordinary faces of both the victims and the perpetrators, and put ourselves into those moments in time.
The exhibit, on display in its U.S. debut through April 15 and presented by the Stan Greenspon Holocaust and Social Justice Education Center at Queens University, is made up of 100 photographs of the camp, with an audio guide that includes testimonies from survivors.
Audio guides are often helpful accessories in museums, but in “Seeing Auschwitz,” they are an essential part of the experience, as they draw us into the images and point out details that simultaneously devastate and transfix.
Take the very first image you come across — a wall-sized photograph showing masses of Jews who have just gotten off cargo trains and are experiencing their first moments at Auschwitz, their arms and backs laden with heavy bags of belongings that they believe they will need in their “resettled” lives. We learn through the audio guide and the printed words on the wall that within hours, most in this group will die.
The audio guide leads us to a woman in the photo who has put down her bag and is staring upward, examining her new reality. It points out a concentration camp prisoner, wearing striped garb, in the strictly forbidden act of talking to one of the women who has just arrived. Was he warning her of what was to come? Helping her devise a plan to survive?
Another photo shows a line of men who are new arrivals to Auschwitz, just off the trains and still in the overcoats and slacks they came in, waiting to be assessed by Nazi guards and doctors. Some are standing in pairs, likely elderly fathers and grown sons. There’s an anxious-looking boy in a too-large overcoat — probably trying to pass as a small adult so he could be put to work as a camp tradesman and spared an immediate death. White-haired old men are walking off in one direction — they almost certainly are being directed to gas chambers, we learn.
There are no photos of corpses or skeletons in “Seeing Auschwitz.” The power lies in the fact that what we do see tells us what we don’t see: piles of shoes. Giant heaps of prisoners’ stolen belongings, in what were called “Kanada” warehouses (“Kanada” meaning “the land of plenty”). Towers with tall billows of smoke extending skyward from chimneys.
We see prisoner mugshots of men, women and children, many with bloodied faces or split lips from beatings. (These mugshots could be an exhibit all to themselves; as the documentation tells us, tens of thousands of them still exist because prisoners who had been ordered to burn them faked doing so in an act of defiance.)
Also chilling, in a different way, are photos showing Nazis who worked at Auschwitz, not only at the camp but enjoying themselves on vacations at a nearby retreat.
We see one of the most senior administrators at Auschwitz with a relaxed grin on his face, reclined on a deck chair with other Auschwitz workers. Happy-looking mothers hold their babies. A group of robust young Auschwitz workers are shown running gleefully.
These aren’t the faces of “monsters of our imagination,” as the audio guide points out. “They suddenly appear much more like us.”
That harrowing idea returns at the end of the exhibit, with writeups on wall panels of examples of more modern-day genocide, including the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia; the murder of Tutsi, Hutu and Twa in Rwanda in 1994; the persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar governments; the murder and deportation of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.
Two women visiting on a recent weekday afternoon read those panels and then stood silent for a moment.
“I want to talk about this,” one woman said to the other. “But I’m going to need to digest it first.”
Indeed.
➡️ If you go: “Seeing Auschwitz” is open through April 15 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets are $17.50 for adults; $15.50 for senior citizens. Students of any age are free. Allow about 60-75 minutes to go through the exhibit. Parking is free at the VAPA Center. The VAPA Center is located at 700 N. Tryon St., but the entrance to the parking lot is on the College Street side of the building. Information and a link to buy tickets is here.
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of the Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Business manager: Brie Chrisman