A Waterloo Engineering researcher is the expert behind an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto about the history of Auschwitz.
Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor in the School of Architecture, widely recognized for his research on the architecture and design of Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers, presents Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away., one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever created on the subject.
The exhibition greets audiences with a single, red, women’s dress shoe, encased in glass in the centre of the room. An image on the wall behind depicts the same shoe atop hundreds of discarded shoes, accompanied by Moshe Szulsztein’s poem We are the Shoes.
The shoe is one of more than 500 original objects on loan from the Auschwitz Memorial and more than 20 other institutions and private collections worldwide. These physical objects and archival records take visitors inside the political and social landscape of Europe between the wars — the rise of Nazism, the construction of Auschwitz and the intellectual and human factors that enabled such systemic atrocities.
“In the very beginning I was interested in creating an exhibition in which we would build up in the mind of the visitor a memory structure,” van Pelt says. “Clearly laying out through stories, where is Auschwitz, what is this place and then to slowly start building up a story that at key moments, touches back on that location.”
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the camp at Auschwitz as they advanced toward Berlin. This date marks the liberation of the 7,600 survivors of Auschwitz’s three main camps and is now internationally recognized as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away. was developed in partnership with Musealia, a company that specializes in creating exhibitions and taking them around the world. The exhibition is on view at the ROM until September 1.
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