When you walk through the new “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.” exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, what stands out most are the poignant items that speak of not just hatred and death but of hope amid the despair.
A touring exhibition that began in Madrid in 2017, “Auschwitz.” brings some 500 objects to the museum’s fourth-floor space ahead of a timely date: the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27. The items and video testimonials, many of which are on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, are not meant to simply horrify — you won’t see any photos of corpses, for example — but to tighten the focus on victims and survivors.
Robert Jan van Pelt, the University of Waterloo architectural historian who curated the ROM show, told the Star the exhibition is “designed to emphasize the importance of making something of your life because many people didn’t have that kind of opportunity.â€
Robert Jan van Pelt, the exhibition’s curator discusses Auschwitz.
R.J. Johnston º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøStarOne example is the love story of Else Van Dam and Leon Greenman, who married in 1935 and moved to Rotterdam. After the birth of their son, Barney, they were all deported to Auschwitz. Leon survived while Elyse and their son perished. After Leon’s death, a friend found a tin for throat lozenges in his bedside table containing Leon’s and Else’s wedding rings and a small white sapphire. A handwritten note by Leon urged the finder to melt the two rings and the sapphire, representing their Barney, into a single piece. On display near the end of the exhibition, these items reveal how an apparently random piece of jewelry can carry great emotional weight.
Here are several other powerful artifacts on display at the “Auschwitz.” exhibition:
“This is a shoe which the woman probably used for an evening of dancing and eating,” says curator Robert Jan van Pelt. “And she took these shoes with her, which means she probably thought she had a future.â€
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“Death begins with the shoes,†wrote historian Primo Levi in describing Auschwitz. Footwear is a thread running through the exhibition, with a lone woman’s dress shoe placed at the start and an SS soldier’s boots seen near the end.
The dress shoe is its own chapter in the Holocaust story, says van Pelt: “This is a shoe which the woman probably used for an evening of dancing and eating. And she took these shoes with her, which means she probably thought she had a future.â€
A sock draped over a child’s shoe speaks to “how the child’s mother likely told her to leave her sock in her shoes when they went to shower (in what turned out to be gas chambers),” notes van Pelt, “similar to how we’ve all been told to leave our socks in our shoes when we go swimming as children.â€Â
Auschwitz road sign
A road sign from 1940 indicates that Auschwitz is part of the Bielitz District of the newly annexed German lands. Germans, van Pelt says, “wanted to create a new utopian city there, and Germans arrived from Eastern Europe to populate this area.â€Â Instead, the area became the dark centre of the Holocaust.
The papers of Theodor Wonja Michael, a Black German forced to work in a labour camp.
R.J. Johnston º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøStarVideo testimonial of Theodor Wonja Michael
The focus on antisemitism and the murder of millions of Jews is vital to the exhibition, but “Auschwitz.” also shows how the Nazis’ racist agenda targeted other communities. One video clip features a tearful Theodor Wonja Michael, whose Black ancestry led German soldiers to accost him in Berlin and force him to work in a labour camp. He also admits to being forcibly sterilized, a Nazi practice that was used to end the bloodlines of non-Aryans. In the video, Michael speaks about how the African diaspora in Germany was consistently in Nazi crosshairs.
Photos of prisoners
More than 50,000 photos of prisoners were taken in Auschwitz, and around 30,000 photos survived the attempts by SS officers to destroy camp records in January 1945. The exhibition reveals the terrifying taxonomy that divided humans into categories, including Jewish, homosexual, political French and political Russian. The head-on photos look directly at viewers, leaving visitors wondering how these faces may have matured if these people ever had a chance to grow up outside the barrack walls.
An Auschwitz prisoner uniform on display at the new ROM exhibition.Â
R.J. Johnston º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøStarOf particular significance are the photos of Charlotte Delbo, a French woman arrested for Resistance protests. One of her translated poems ends the exhibit: “You who are passing by / I beg you / do something / learn a dance step / something to justify your existence.â€
Photos of soldiers dividing prisoners near trains
Several photos reveal the cold and calculating method to divide Auschwitz prisoners, such as laying out two columns: men and boys 16 and older in one area, and women, girls and children in the other. “There are groups of people here who are too old and sick to stand in the heat of the day,” van Pelt says, “They’ll be taken to the gas chambers right away.â€
In this dividing area, parents sometimes urged their teens to tell soldiers they had a skill, such as woodworking, van Pelt says, “anything to make sure they do some kind of work and will avoid death.â€
Scale model of Auschwitz
Some of van Pelt’s former students crafted a 1:200 model of the concentration camp, detailing every cabin, gas chamber, railway ramp and crematorium. Van Pelt points to round objects near the north end of the camp that represent sewage treatment plants and underscore the complicity between the state and Nazism. At first, regional planning officers visited Auschwitz and ordered an architectural overhaul due to the way officers were dumping untreated sewage into the Ula River, threatening to close the camp if they didn’t install the plants.Â
An infant’s onesie and a baby’s dress
Several artifacts point to the devastating horror children faced during the Holocaust. A child’s onesie and a baby’s dress speak to a demented mentality that van Pelt says was inherent in the Nazi regime: “I remember hearing how Oskar Gröning, a former SS soldier, said in a documentary how children aren’t the enemy at the moment but that the enemy is the blood inside them, and how children have to be included as well.â€Â
Wire-mesh gas chamber column
The architecture of torture and death is on display in a room dedicated to the Nazi gas chambers. Standing starkly in the middle of the space is a life-size model of a gas chamber column. Fifteen minutes after the introduction of the poison gas Zyklon B, 2,000 people packed into the chamber would die. Then it would happen again. “What this column essentially represents is the continuity of murder,†van Pelt says.
When prisoners undressed before being led into gas chambers, the buttons on their shirts were likely the last things they touched before dying.
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Such tiny commonplace objects might seem unusual to spread throughout the exhibit, but van Pelt says buttons evoke a heartbreaking truth: When Auschwitz prisoners undressed before they were led into gas chambers, the buttons on their shirts and blouses were likely the last things they touched before dying. It’s hard not to think of the hands that last graced those buttons, or how those fasteners may have flown off if a shirt was yanked by a guard. As with the many artifacts preserved by the exhibition, these items leave us with symbols of the evil levelled at millions of Jews and act as memorials to the many lives lost.
