When Israeli President Isaac Herzog entered the United Nations on Monday to keynote the organization’s annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, he first headed to a small, private gathering below the General Assembly Hall.
Tracked every step by supporters, Herzog made his way around an exhibit of about 10 posters, set up specifically for the event. The haunting photographs and stories captured in the exhibit were taken from the Auschwitz Album, the only known visual documentation of the process employed by the Nazis leading to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The exhibition is one of three temporary exhibits on display at U.N. headquarters through Feb. 21 as part of the U.N. Outreach Programme on the Holocaust’s annual commemoration. There is also a permanent exhibition year-round inside the Secretariat Building.
• “Auschwitz—A Place on Earth. The Auschwitz Album,” like the other two temporary exhibitions, can be found near the main public entrance to U.N. headquarters. It is organized by Yad Vashem.
Two of the guards assigned to handle fingerprinting and photographing of incoming prisoners are believed to have taken most, if not all, of the 193 photographs in the 56-page album, which depicts the arrival of transports from Hungary in the spring of 1944. One of those guards wrote the captions, which do not depict any actual murders, and which portray the Nazis’ view of the process.
The photographs show the arrival of boxer cars, packed to the brim, and the separation and selection process aboard a train platform, including children, who were among those sent to immediate death.
The album also shows slave laborers, and a picture of a woman with four children in tow, apparently heading toward the gas chambers. Details of the album’s discovery are also included.
• “Holocaust Remembrance—A Commitment to Truth” is an overview of the Shoah, featuring testimony of survivors and a historical look at the factors that fomented the Holocaust and allowed it to take shape.
• “Lest We Forget,” meanwhile, details small, enjoyable moments of Jews before the Holocaust took place, as a reminder of life before the Nazis and of the humanity of European Jewish communities that stood there.
The four siblings of the Meyer family from Bonn, Germany, are shown smiling on the balcony of their home in 1934. The children’s father was murdered by the Nazis later that year, and their mother was never seen again by her youngest child, Yaakov, after she took him to the train station to catch the Kindertransport to England in 1939.
One of the children, Herbert, was murdered with his wife at Auschwitz-Birkenau, while the two sisters left for England after the family fell into poverty with the murder of their father.
The photographs showing happy home life, followed by the turning of the head to read of the fates of the subjects of the portraits, is gut-punching.
Saints and Liars
In addition, last week, the U.N. Outreach Programme on the Holocaust hosted one of its scholar advisers, noted Holocaust scholar Debórah Dwork, for a discussion in tandem with the launch of her book, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis.
Dwork, the director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, told JNS the new book was developed through her research for Children With A Starr: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, which was her first book about the Holocaust, and which taught a broader perspective of the plight of Jewish children in Europe beyond the well-known story of Anne Frank.
“As I was researching the children, I came to research people who aided and helped Jewish children through assistance on the ground in Europe, providing food, providing shelter, and also through assistance, helping them to flee whatever country they were in,” Dwork said.
During that research, Dwork said she came across a photograph of an American Quaker woman in Marseille, France, holding a Jewish child in her arms.
“I asked myself, ‘Who are you? What prompted you to leave the United States and go to Europe to help, to provide assistance, to try to rescue?’ So I asked myself that question, but I was engaged with writing another book.”
Some 20 years and five books later, Dwork returned to that picture and those questions.
“Why now? I was ready,” she told JNS.
The United Nations Outreach Programme on the Holocaust also teamed with the Center for Jewish History last week to host a screening of the documentary UnBroken: Would You Hide Me? along with a panel discussion with the film’s director, producer and writer Beth Lane and her mother, Holocaust survivor Ginger Lane.
The film, which claimed the 2023 Heartland Film Festival’s Best Premiere Documentary Feature award, tells the story of seven siblings who survive the Holocaust together.
“The Holocaust is always hovering over our heads,” Michael Herzog, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, told JNS upon seeing the Auschwitz Album exhibit. “We have to remember that Israel has faced an existential situation, and we have to be strong, united and learn the lessons of the Holocaust.”