Auschwitz: artefacts as witness Paul Salmons
Wheel set from steam locomotive. ‘
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uschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.’ is the world’s largest travelling exhibition about the history and significance of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration and death camp. Produced by Musealia in collaboration with the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, it opened in Madrid two years ago, receiving some 600,000 visitors. Currently at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, it will move to Kansas City in June 2021. Paul Salmons, a curator of the exhibition, delivered the Betty and Shmuel Rosenkranz Oration in November 2020. This is an edited extract of the oration. Auschwitz is a story of destruction. The murder of more than one million people, and then a desperate attempt by the killers to hide all trace of their crimes: destroying the gas chambers and crematoria, burning documents, killing witnesses. This exhibition documents that history; it safeguards the memory of the victims; and it indicts the society that created the largest site of mass murder on earth. It presents not only the material evidence of these vast crimes, much of it on public display for the first time, but also
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Courtesy of ©Museali. Photo: Carlos Barea
artefacts that bear witness to the lives of the victims. Seemingly ordinary things, they are a tangible link to a murdered people – their clothing, the tools of their trades, the gifts they gave to one another, the items they cherished. Seven hundred artefacts. And each tells its own story, if we are prepared to listen. One of the first artefacts the visitor encounters is a huge wheel set from a steam train locomotive. It is of a type that pulled wagon loads of Jews and others across the railways of Europe to Auschwitz, most of them to their deaths. In the exhibition it becomes a symbol of the wider perpetrator society, and the technology and bureaucracy necessary to carry out a modern, industrialised genocide. Nearby, a huge photograph represents the vast number of victims: a mountain of shoes taken from the dead in Auschwitz. But beyond the image of the mass are individual lives; we need the visitor to understand the impact of genocide on the human scale. And so – in front of the photograph – we display another original artefact, in stark contrast to the train’s wheels: one red fashionable shoe.
