On Saturday, I went to the Saunders Castle at the Boston Park Plaza to attend a special exhibit called Auschwitz - Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. A collaboration between Musealia and The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the exhibit premiered in Boston on Friday and will run through September 2nd.
This exhibit actually opened while I was living in New York in May 2019. However, I just never got around to arranging a visit. This time around I wanted to see as soon as I possibly could.
The significance of Auschwitz cannot be emphasized enough. Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime were transported to Auschwitz from as far south as Greece and as far north as Norway to face either immediate extermination or a far slower death from slave labor. More than a million people, mostly Jews, died there. Most of these deaths took place over a two-year period between 1942 and 1944 before the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz with the Soviets fast approaching.
Although I am familiar with what happened at Auschwitz, the exhibit really hit me deep once I watched and listened to filmed accounts of Holocaust survivors. They told of 150 people being packed onto single cattle cars with precious little air with a single bucket of drinking water and a single bucket as a bathroom. Imagine being in that cattle car not knowing that things would only get worse once you disembarked.
It took me about 2 hours and 15 minutes to make my way through the entire exhibit and it felt much longer than that. I felt this way because I interpret "not far away" as Auschwitz is much closer than we think. In what has been the worst hours for the Jews since the Holocaust, we are amid a worldwide surge of anti-Semitism and the surge has only just begun.
Indeed, a couple of days ago, the New York Department of Education moved teacher Danielle Kaminsky from Origin High School after facing a barrage of anti-Semitic commentary from students including one student who told her, “I guess Hitler is really dead then – you’re still here,” with another student posing as Hitler. NYC Schools Chancellor astonishingly expressed sympathy for the student and his privacy while his staff gave Kaminsky the third degree.
There can be little doubt that these kids have been taught to hate Jews whether at home, at their house of worship or online. I shudder to think what will happen to American Jewry when they reach adulthood. In 15-20 years from now, if not sooner, anti-Semitism in America will become mainstream and Jews will be rendered into second-class citizens unworthy of humanity.
Frankly, I did not attend the Auschwitz exhibit to remember what had happened in our recent past, but rather to prepare for what might bode for my future as a Jew in America.
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