In his remarks at the opening ceremony, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Cywiński, said: “Today we are living in a very difficult world. It's no longer a postwar era. There are so many new cases of dehumanization, new racism, antisemitism, xenophobia. Remembrance is perhaps the last key that we have, to understand and imagine our own role today in the world that we are living in.”
Elizabeth Pierce, CEO of Cincinnati Museum Center, said the exhibition offers "a moment of remembrance of the lives, the generations, and the communities lost in Auschwitz."
She added that it “challenges us to reflect and to understand how human beings could commit such atrocities, and likewise, how human beings could endure such hardship.”
Pierce also said that the exhibition “implores us to remember the exponential danger of unchecked hate, and it compels us to find courage within ourselves to act. After all, if one person's vision could lead to such horror, imagine how one act of courage, one act of kindness, one act of humanity, could make our world much brighter.”
Among those present at the opening ceremony was Steve Coppel, whose father, Auschwitz survivor Werner Coppel, arrived at Union Station in 1949 and started a new life in Cincinnati.
Coppel said of his father: “He lost everything, but he arrived here with his wife, his baby, my older brother, and a suitcase. And from that moment, he began again. That same suitcase, worn and simple, is now part of the exhibition on display, just steps from where he stood when he came to this city. Every time I see it, I am struck by what it represents.”
The exhibition features more than 500 original objects 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 the original barrack for prisoners; a desk and other possessions of the first and longest-serving Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; a gas mask used by Adolf Hitler's elite SS security force, and a lithograph depicting a prisoner's face by Pablo Picasso.
The first touring exhibition on the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland, the display has been prepared jointly by the Auschwitz Museum in Poland and Spanish company Musealia, with artifacts loaned from more than 20 collections around the world, including the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wiener Library and the memorial sites in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen in Germany, Mauthausen in Austria and Westerbork in the Netherlands.
The Auschwitz. Not so long ago. Not so far away exhibition has so far been shown in Spain, Sweden and several American cities, attracting over 1.5 million visitors since 2017.
Over 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz, mostly European Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and others.
The exhibition in Cincinnati, Ohio runs until April 12, 2026.
(mk)
Source: Auschwitz Memorial Museum