At the opening ceremony, Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in southern Poland, warned that remembrance remains vital amid rising global intolerance.
“Today we are living in a very difficult world,” Cywiński said. “There are so many new cases of dehumanization, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia. Remembrance is perhaps the last key we have to understand and imagine our own role in the world we live in.”
Elizabeth Pierce, president and CEO of the Cincinnati Museum Center, said the exhibition offers “a moment of remembrance of the lives, generations, and communities lost in Auschwitz.”
She added that it “challenges us to reflect on how human beings could commit such atrocities, and likewise, how others could endure such hardship.”
Among those attending the opening was Steve Coppel, whose father, Auschwitz survivor Werner Coppel, arrived at Union Terminal in 1949 to begin a new life in Cincinnati.
“He lost everything, but he arrived here with his wife, his baby, my older brother, and a suitcase,” Coppel said of his father. “That same suitcase, worn and simple, is now part of the exhibition—just steps from where he once stood.”
The exhibition features more than 500 original objects, including suitcases, eyeglasses and shoes belonging to Auschwitz victims and survivors.
Other artifacts include concrete fence posts, fragments of a prisoner barrack, personal items of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, a gas mask used by Adolf Hitler’s elite SS force, and a Pablo Picasso lithograph depicting a prisoner’s face.
The travelling exhibition was organized by the Auschwitz Museum and Spanish company Musealia, with artifacts on loan from more than 20 institutions worldwide, including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Since its debut in 2017, Auschwitz. Not so long ago. Not so far away has been shown in Spain, Sweden and several US cities, attracting more than 1.5 million visitors.
More than 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz, most of them European Jews, along with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others.
The exhibition in Cincinnati, Ohio runs until April 12, 2026.
(mk/gs)
Source: Auschwitz Memorial Museum