The curators of this unique exhibition are international experts: Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, and Dr. Paul Salmons, who worked closely with historians and curators from the Auschwitz Museum Research Center headed by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz.
‘Today we are living in a very difficult world. It's no longer a post-war era. There are so many new cases of dehumanization, new racism, antisemitism, xenophobia. I think we really need the remembrance, perhaps even more than it was 20 or 30 years ago. 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,’ said director of the Auschwitz Museum, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, at the opening of the exhibition.
‘This exhibition has travelled for some years to different cities in the world. Now it arrived here, and you will be tempted to show it, especially to some new generations, thinking that they will find some answers here. No, they will not. This history, and the remembrance of the Shoah, does not give us good, soft, easy, or clear answers, only questions. This is the most important thing we could give you. Questions are extremely important, even if those questions are not easy, and they are really not easy. As Elie Wiesel said, “in every question we can find
a power that you will never see in the answers”,’ he emphasized.
The exhibition depicts the successive stages of the development of Nazi ideology and describes the transformation of Oświęcim, an ordinary Polish town where Nazi Germany established the largest concentration camp and extermination center during the occupation, where approximately one million Jews and tens of thousands of people of other nationalities were murdered.
The victims of Auschwitz also included Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and other groups persecuted by Nazi ideology, such as people with disabilities, asocials, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. Furthermore, the exhibition includes objects portraying the world of the perpetrators—the SS men who created and managed this largest German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.
Elizabeth Pierce, President and CEO of Cincinnati Museum Center said that this exhibition offers us a moment of remembrance of the lives, the generations, and the communities lost in Auschwitz.
‘It challenges us to reflect and to understand how human beings could commit such atrocities, and likewise, how human beings could endure such hardship. It 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,’ said Elizabeth Pierce.
‘At the core of this exhibition lies this need to tell the story of the site of Auschwitz through the different groups of victims, through the different experiences, through the evolution of a site that is changing through the years, and of course, that core essence of what are we willing to do in some occasions to fulfill
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