The show is the first touring exhibition on the World War II Nazi German Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland.
It has been put together 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 exhibition, on display since Thursday, 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.
It includes more than 700 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 an original barrack for prisoners; a desk and other possessions of the first and the longest serving Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; and a gas mask used by Adolf Hitler's elite SS security force.
According to Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, the exhibition confronts visitors with "the terrifying chapter in mankind’s history and asks questions about the future based on the memory of the past, a future free of anti-Semitism, racism and other ideologies of hatred and dehumanization.”
The Auschwitz. Not so long ago. Not so far away exhibition has previously been shown in Spain, Sweden and several American cities, attracting over 1.5 million visitors since 2017. In Boston, almost 50,000 tickets have been sold.
The exhibition, located at the Castle at Boston’s Park Plaza, runs until September 2.
(mk/gs)