The first touring exhibition on the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz, it has been prepared jointly by the Auschwitz Museum in Poland and Spanish company Musealia.
The opening of the exhibition in Kansas City coincides with Poland's National Remembrance Day for Victims of Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camps.
The day is marked in Poland on June 14 in memory of the first Poles transported to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940.
The Auschwitz. Not so long ago. Not so far away exhibition explores the dual identity of Auschwitz as a physical location—the largest documented mass murder site in human history—and as a symbol of the borderless manifestation of hatred and human barbarity.
On display are more than 700 original objects and 400 photographs, including hundreds of personal items, such as suitcases, eyeglasses and shoes, that belonged to survivors and victims of Auschwitz.
Other artifacts include concrete posts that were part of the fence of the Auschwitz camp; fragments of an original barrack for prisoners; a desk and other possessions of the first and the longest serving Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; a gas mask used by Adolf Hitler's elite SS security force; and an original German-made freight train car used for the deportation of Jews to the ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Poland.
The exhibition is on show at the Bank of America Gallery in Kansas City's Union Station. It runs until the end of January 2022.
Before coming to Kansas City, the Auschwitz. Not so long ago. Not so far away exhibition spent two years at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Its first venue was Madrid, where it opened in December 2016.
(mk/gs)