Auschwitz exhibition in Madrid

Entitled Not long ago. Not far away, the exhibition includes over 600 original objects, mostly from the collections of the Auschwitz Museum in the Polish city of Oświęcim, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, as well as from private collections.

The first ever travelling exhibition on Auschwitz, it has been put together jointly by Poland’s Auschwitz Museum and Spanish company Musealia, which enlisted the help of prominent experts such as Michael Berenbaum, an American scholar, rabbi, writer and filmmaker who was a former Project Director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Musealia’s Luis Ferreiro, who serves as Project Director for the exhibition, describes it as “an introspective journey across the very nature of mankind, experienced through the ‘dual’ history of the camp: Auschwitz as a physical location and Auschwitz as a symbol and metaphor for the borderless manifestation of human barbarity.”

The exhibits include an original German-made Model 2 freight car of the type used by the Deutsche Reichsbahn for the deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Poland. Also on display are prisoners’ shoes, glasses and suitcases, objects that were made illegally by prisoners, such as knives, as well as some items that belonged to their Nazi German oppressors.

The exhibition will remain on show in Madrid until June 17. It is then due to visit seven other European cities, starting most probably from Malmoe in Sweden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, followed by seven cities in North America.

Organisers expect that the exhibition will bring the story of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp, in which over 1.5 million people perished during World War II, to millions of people on both sides of the pond. (mk/gs)