This exhibition, more than some of our other exhibitions, I would say,
is a bit of a think piece.
The goal is to provoke people to think about
the behaviors of a lot of
very ordinary people during the Holocaust,
and it raises questions. There are not always set answers. There's a
tendency to reduce everything to
Hitler and Nazi
leaders. The other thing is to attribute it all to antisemitism.
It's very, very difficult,
in general to read
into motives, so we raise these questions.
One of the elements about quote "typical" Holocaust history is it tends to be divided
up between perpetrator, victim,
and bystander.
I think over time, as we keep looking at this history, the term "bystander" becomes
less and less effective as a way of understanding what takes place in this
history. There is a way of looking at this history about ordinary people in
ordinary circumstances,
or what seems to be an ordinary circumstance, what is going on even
further away from that core experience.
This exhibition really talks about the folks who had the local level find
themselves caught up in the events the end up being part of the Holocaust story.
The challenges in creating this exhibition were
many. Largely there is no
coherent or very concise body of scholarship on the subject matter. Susan
Bachrach, the curator, had to read very extensively. Her bibliography that she
developed is 175 pages long of things that she has had to
go through to get at these nuggets of stories that have never really been
synthesized in any one place.
People weren't forced to do what they do.
Sometimes that's also the percpetion, people were just forced to do what they do,
and we show in this exhibition
that, even though it
sometimes took great courage, that people did have choices.
Every one of our special exhibitions we have now done here
has its own look,
and it's one of the great joys of working with the designer who comes with fresh eyes and
looks at this content and comes up with these wonderfully creative ways of being able to
express that, to move concepts that are on paper into three dimensions.
The space itself was a challenge.
It only has one entry, and
it's a long corridor, and
what we actually did there is we created
oversized scaled images of class pictures, of
companies all gathered together for a picnic,
Very innocent, kind
of happy gatherings,
and then you hear an audio,
voices of some of those survivors talking about that person.
It's my best friend.
And then we highlight
just a few individuals
on those graphics.
Any group photo that we have
in this exhibition had to have at least perpetrators in it, or collaborators,
or onlookers, and one of the goals of the exhibition is to get
a visitor to look beyond maybe
what's the center of the photo,
which is what's happening
usually to Jewish victims.
We want them to look on the margins to see what was making all this possible.
The notion of "neighbors" came from testimony given to us by one of our
survivors.
The phrase, "Some were neighbors," is his, and we quote it in a couple of places in the
exhibition itself.
They worked together, they lived in the same community,
they met in the same stores in shops,
yet there was this huge turn, one against the other.
Wherever we can,
we try to show these individual,
the range of behaviors and the different choices that people made.
For example, we have a policeman who turned
over Jews during Kritallnacht to the SS,
and that's side
by side with the story of a police
officer who protected
a Jewish family from harm.
Testimonies can turn the tables on
visitors' common
expectations.
We have the the story of someone
who was actually
being hidden in Germany, which is very hard.
Our friend Heinz knew somebody
that was the manager factory, and he was able to get my brother a room
above the factory,
and, so my brother would work there. Unfortunately,
this man also was embezzling money from the factory,
and in order for his boss not to put him in jail,
he decided to
call the Gestapo
and say that his boss
was hiding a Jew up in his room,
and that's how they, the Gestapo found my brother.
We're looking at ranges of behaviors, we're looking at ranges of motives. What
encouraged people to take the actions that they did?
What were they thinking when they were doing this?
We hope that visitors actually spend some time thinking about
the questions that are actually posed in the exhibition. While we never say what would
you do, it's what will you do.
That was my girlfriend.
We used to go together, have fun together.
This was a boy that grew up with me.
And among them was
some of the people I went to school with.
We were friends,
I thought.
They were neighbors.