Proof about the Holocaust from first person documentations preserved in Weiner Museum exhibit

MaineWriter- In my opinion, there was a time when I couldn't fathom how anyone would deny the reality of the Holocaust. The horror is a historical fact that was witnessed by all of Europe and the World War II American camp liberators. Beyond belief, but the Holocaust deniers are intent on erasing the horror of the 6 million who were murdered by Nazis in concentration camps. For that reason, the work of those who protect this tortuous history is more important than ever. Humanity must be protected from the risk of a repeat of the Holocaust.

A new exhibition at the Weiner Museum traces the stories and the legacies of the individuals and institutions who worked during and immediately after the Holocaust to record and collect information of atrocities and bring perpetrators to justice.

The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide

29 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DP Tel: +44 (0) 20 7636 7247

The first edition of "Oyf di Felder fun Treblinke" ("In the Fields of Treblinka") by Rachel Auerbach, 1947 (Wiener Library Collections )

By Brigit Katz in Smithsonian.com

During the Holocaust, in camps and in ghettos, the incarcerated documented the facts and gathered evidence. After the war, in a variety of countries and organisations, this work continued, and attention turned towards prosecution of perpetrators and towards prevention of future genocides. The collection of evidence and research was also an important aspect of the huge post-war task of tracing the missing after the Holocaust, and has been a feature of the work of commemorative institutions ever since.

In November of 1954, a researcher named Eva Reichmann issued an impassioned appeal to Holocaust survivors who had started their lives anew in Great Britain: come to her with their wartime stories, letters, diaries, photos, documents—anything related to the horrors they had suffered under the Nazi regime—so their experiences could be recorded, cataloged and safe-guarded.

“Under no circumstances must this material, written or unwritten, get lost,” she wrote in her call-to-action, published by the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain. “[I]t has to be preserved for the future historian.”

At this early stage after the war, Reichmann, a Jewish historian and sociologist who fled from Germany to Britain in 1939, was already anticipating a day when eyewitnesses to Holocaust history would be gone—a timeline that is fast approaching today. And so she embarked on an ambitious project to collect the testimonies of refugees and survivors across Europe.

She conducted her work in her capacity as research director for the Wiener Library in London, which was founded in 1933 with the goal of collecting information about Nazi persecution. 

Today, the institution has become one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives. For a new exhibition launched by the library this week, it is shining new light on the efforts of Reichmann and other early Holocaust researchers—pioneers who set out to create a reliable record of one of history’s darkest chapters.

Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers tells the stories of a diverse group of men and women who, in many cases, had experienced the Nazi persecution they set out to document. Alfred Wiener, the library’s founder and namesake, was a German Jew forced to flee to Amsterdam, and subsequently to England, in the face of mounting anti-Semitism. 

Early on, Wiener had sensed the dangers of Germany’s rising fascist movement and had started amassing an archive of information about the Nazis, which he brought with him to the U.K. Among the artifacts on display at the exhibition is a 1919 pamphlet in which Wiener warns fellow Jews about the possibility of an orchestrated attack against their community.

Curator Barbara Warnock tells Smithsonian.com that the exhibition was a natural project to take on, given the library’s roots in the field of early Holocaust research. 

Drawing on the institution's vast collection of more than 1 million objects, the show highlights the prescience, determination and sheer bravery of the earliest documentarians of the Holocaust—some of whom gathered evidence in ghettos and concentration camps, endangering their own lives in the process.

Filip Müller, for instance, secretly collected information about Auschwitz-Birkenau while he was a member of the sonderkommandos, the Jewish prisoners forced to work in gas chambers and the crematoria. 

Müller gathered lists of Auschwitz SS commanders, and even peeled off a label from a can of Zyklon B—a cyanide-based pesticide used in gas chambers to murder people—and passed them on to two prisoners who were ultimately able to escape the camp with the evidence. 

Müller knew he was risking his life spiriting away such information; he had seen first-hand how insubordination was punished. In a 1957 document featured in the exhibition, he testifies that an overseer of a crematorium, whom he identifies only as “Kaminsky,” had been executed for “deliberately protect[ing] the illegal resistance activities.”

The exhibition also includes the posthumously published English edition of Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, an account by the activist and historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who orchestrated a clandestine archival project within the ghetto’s walls. 

Operating under the name Oneg Shabbat, the contributors wrote about their personal experiences of daily life in the ghetto, conducted interviews with their neighbors and amassed a huge trove of documents—everything from photographs, to candy wrappers, to posters calling for resistance. When hundreds of thousands of Jews were being deported from the ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, the secret archivists crammed their materials into milk cans and metal boxes and buried them, hoping that they would someday be discovered.

Ringelblum was ultimately shot to death in a prison in Poland. A Galician woman named Rachel Auerbach, who escaped the ghetto and went into hiding, was among the few members of Oneg Shabbat who survived the Holocaust. She helped retrieve parts of the archive after the war's end and, following a visit to Treblinka in 1945, wrote a comprehensive book about the extermination camp. An original first edition, Yiddish-language copy of that text, In the Fields of Treblinka, is also on display in the show.

Once the fighting had drawn to a close, and survivors of the genocide had been liberated, the movement to collect evidence was propelled by other urgent needs. War crimes trials were underway, and researchers like Auerbach assisted in Allied efforts to prepare prosecutions against prominent Nazis. Then there was, of course, the matter of tracking down the millions of displaced and dead.

“It was a very chaotic situation,” says Warnock. “[There was] a huge effort to centralize and gather together all documents collected by occupying armies: any death camp records, any transportation records and other Nazi documentation that fell into the Allies’ hands.”

But for researchers like Eva Reichmann, the main impetus for collecting evidence was to piece together a “great narrative” of the Holocaust, one that would endure for generations to come. In her 1954 call-to-action, which is on display at the exhibition, she wrote that bringing war criminals to justice was “by far the weakest motive prompting our call for the preservation of our collective experience.” More important, she explained, was the “perennial wish that the memory of our dead should be enshrined in a dignified account.”

Vital to Reichmann’s mission was gathering testimonies of the Holocaust from the perspectives of a wide range of people who were affected by it. A coversheet of one of the accounts she collected is on view at the exhibition; the document features a Nazi soldier describing his experience on the frontlines—and how he learned of the horrors that were taking place in Auschwitz while he was at battle.

Other early chroniclers of the Holocaust were similarly interested in piecing together a comprehensive record based on eyewitness accounts. In doing so, says Warnock, they set themselves apart from the earliest academic historians of the Second World War, who treated the Holocaust as a chapter within the broader narrative of the Nazi regime, rather than a subject in its own right. She estimates that it took until the late 1960s at the earliest, and perhaps even onto the 1980s, for a larger shift in the framing of the Holocaust to occur in academia. “Until more recent years, early testimonies were kind of forgotten about, and it wasn't a major focus of the work of historians,” she says.

Scholars today, by contrast, are intensely interested in the testimonies of individual witnesses and victims of the Holocaust. And thanks to the foresight of the researchers profiled in the exhibition, contemporary historians have access to a wealth of such precious early firsthand accounts of the attrocities, painstakingly assembled all those years ago.

“We all bear witness,” Reichmann wrote in her appeal to survivors to share their stories with the Wiener Library. Understanding the vast importance such work would hold for future generations, she added, “We all have a duty to fulfill towards our past.”

Tribute to Virginia women

New Virginia Monument Will Pay Tribute to Hundreds of Historic Women ~ Article published in The Smithsonian by Brigit Katz

http://womensmonumentcom.virginia.gov/PDFs/WMC12Figures.pdf

A plan for the Virginia women’s monument (Virginia Capitol Foundation via StudioEIS and the 1717 Design Group)

The monument features 12 bronze statues and a wall etched with 400 additional names of women who played an important role in shaping Virginia’s history ~ reference to article here

In May, a dozen actors gathered at a stark Brooklyn studio dressed in an eclectic range of women’s garb: a traditional Native American dress, a frilly white bonnet, a tattered apron, a luxurious purple gown. Photographers snapped away as the actors struck poses, giving first life to an innovative new monument that will be erected some 350 miles away in Richmond, Virginia.

Images of the actors are being used as models for 12 bronze statues of historic women, which will be arranged in a new plaza in Virginia’s Capitol Square. Some of the women that will be featured in the monument are well-known figures. Others have been largely forgotten. The women were active in different eras, lived in different parts of the state, and hailed from diverse backgrounds. But all of them made significant contributions to Virginia’s rich history.

“Voices from the Garden,” as the monument is titled, has been in the works for a decade. In 2008, a group of women from Richmond met with then-Senator Walter Stosch to express their concerns about gaps in Virginia schools’ history curriculum. “They felt like young women and young men coming up through the school system did not know enough about people who had made a significant contribution to the commonwealth, particularly women,” says Susan Clarke Schaar, clerk of the Virginia Senate.

A monument that would stand tall in Capitol Square, the park that surrounds the State Capitol Building, seemed like a powerful way to pay tribute to the legacies of Virginia’s historic women. And so the Virginia Women’s Monument Commission was founded to put the plan into motion, and its members began soliciting design proposals. 

The winning design, created by the Brooklyn-based StudioEIS, features 12 bronze statues installed throughout an oval-shaped garden. A glass panel that surrounds the statues will be etched with the names of 400 additional women.

Recently, the commission announced that it had secured funding for four of the statues: Cockacoeske, a Pamunkey leader who negotiated with colonial officials to secure land and hunting rights for her people; Anne Burras Laydon, who was among the earliest English settlers of Jamestown; Virginia E. Randolph, the child of former slaves who became a respected educator; and the suffrage leader Adele Clark. The other eight monuments remain in various stages of fundraising, but Schaar says that the commission hopes to unveil all 12 in October of 2019.

While planning the new monument, the commission asked the public to suggest historic figures who might be featured in the design. To be considered, nominees had to have been deceased for at least ten years and made a significant contribution to Virginia or the nation as a whole. From hundreds of nominations, officials whittled the selection down to a final 12. (The original design imagined just 10 women depicted in sculpture form, but Schaar says they decided to expand that number once they realized their list couldn’t be narrowed down any further.)

“With the help of the library of Virginia, and women’s studies professors throughout the state, we looked at all of those people, we read their stories,” Schaar says.

The 12 women featured represent 400 years of Virginia history, and pay tribute to the state’s geographic and racial diversity. Others honored with a statue include Clementina Bird Rind, the pioneering editor of the Virginia Gazette, Maggie L. Walker, the first female bank president in the United States, and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who became a successful dressmaker, activist and the confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Several prominent Virginians did not make it onto the commission’s final list, which sparked its share of controversy once the names were first announced. “[Someone] had a full-page ad taken out in the Richmond Times-Dispatch telling people to call me … on Thanksgiving morning and complain that we didn’t pick Pocahontas,” Schaar says.

Selecting only 12 women for the monument was “not easy,” Schaar says. The process came with the unenviable task of choosing between important figures like Martha Washington and Dolley Madison (officials ultimately went with Washington). “We knew we didn’t want [to include just the] people everyone could identify,” Schaar explains. “We wanted other people who are not quite as well known, but who did something significant that would entice people to learn more about other women.”

When the sculptures are finally erected, they will add new dimension to Capitol Square, which is dotted with tributes to prominent men—George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, Virginia governors William Smith and Harry Flood Byrd Sr., Edgar Allan Poe—but just one of a woman: Barbara Johns, a teenager who led her fellow African-American students in a walkout protest against school segregation in 1951.

The effect will be a powerful reminder at the seat of state government that women, too, played an important role in shaping Virginia—and continue to do so. 

To date, officials have chosen only 250 names for the glass panel that surrounds the sculpture garden. The remaining 150 names will be filled in over the years, as Virginia’s women continue to make their mark on history.