AUSCHWITZ EXHIBIT SHOWS HOW PRISONERS USED FAITH TO SURVIVE
The new exhibit is different from others because it doesn't focus on the brutality of the Nazi's. Instead it shows how faith helped victims and survivors persevere.
BY JERUSALEM POST STAFF
JULY 2, 2019 10:51
1 minute read.
New Auschwitz Faith Exhibit . (photo credit: DANIEL LIBESKIND)
A new exhibit in Auschwitz, titled “Through the Lens of Faith,” provides visitors a new perspective on how faith played a role in surviving the Holocaust.
The new exhibit is different from others because it doesn't focus on the brutality of the Nazi's. Instead it shows how faith helped victims and survivors persevere.
The new exhibit is different from others because it doesn't focus on the brutality of the Nazi's. Instead it shows how faith helped victims and survivors persevere.
The architect, Daniel Libeskind, who helped design the exhibit, used repetitive patterns of panels – symbolic of the prison uniform stripes – to convey imprisonment. The exterior of the display is made of reflective black glass to evoke physical and spiritual freedom.
“We can’t understand the millions that were murdered in the Holocaust, but we can understand one person’s story. This exhibition brings the stories of the survivors into focus, while weaving their intimate accounts into the context of the camp and contemporary life,” says Libeskind.
Twenty one panels line each side of the exhibit. The Amud Aish Memorial Museum’s chief curator interviewed 21 Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors and inscribed their experiences and portraits into the steel panels.
The new portraits were taken of 18 Jewish survivors, two Polish and one Sinti over three years in each survivor's home. Since the photographs were taken, two of the survivors have passed away but their families know their stories will live on through their memories.
Rabbi Sholom Friedmann, director of Amud Aish Memorial Museum said, “Faith enabled these victims to persevere in spite of the hell they were subject to.”
The exhibit was sponsored in part by Jewish Russian philanthropist Viktor Vekselberg, who is chairman of the board of trustees at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and who lost 16 members of his family in the Holocaust.
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