An exhibition of the Holocaust, which nearly wiped out the entire European Jewish and Polish populations between 1941 and 1945, has finally landed in Africa.
The world-renowned exhibition, Seeing Auschwitz, has been on show globally for a couple of years. The exhibition, which opened at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre on Sunday, is also shown in London for R300. However, it is free in South Africa and will be on show until March 2023.
The exhibit
Conceived and produced by Musealia in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for the observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims, Seeing Auschwitz is an exhibition of the German Nazi camp Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
Told through 100 photographs, sketches, and testimonies captured by perpetrators, victims, liberators, and survivors, the exhibition confronts the viewer with blunt evidence of the mass murder of people who perished at the Auschwitz camps.
“The vast collection of images comes from varying sources including aerial allied pictures of the camps [many taken by South African Air Force’s 60 Squadron, one of the leading aerial photographic units operating in Europe during the war], documentation of the deportation process and living within Auschwitz, as well as insight into life before the camps.
“The exhibition presents more than 100 images of victims and perpetrators, as well as snapshots of the systematic extermination process and scenes of everyday life in Auschwitz, mostly immortalized by the SS perpetrators themselves and audiovisual testimonies of survivors.
“These provide unequivocal evidence of the crimes committed at Auschwitz and, at the same time, present a great challenge to the viewer.”
Present at the opening was Iris Singer, a film producer and presenter, who shared the psychogeographical journey of some of the students who have stepped on the grounds of Auschwitz. Their testimonies show that one might have learnt about the holocaust at school but the exhibit changes the perspective and raises many questions.
The exhibit places the viewer on an intriguing yet disturbing trawl all the way from when the victims lived a normal life to when they were transported to the death camps and finally how many of them perished.
“They look like faithful portraits of an instant, but these photographs are not neutral sources at all. We are looking at a piece of reality but seen from the Nazi perspective.
“It is necessary to stop and analyze them to really see what each image truly reveals, not only about the place and the moment, but also about their own authors, the people portrayed, and even about ourselves as viewers,” said lead curator and expert on the Holocaust, Paul Salmons.
Director of Musealia, Luis Ferreiro said: “Memory, both individual and collective, is largely formed through images. In the case of Auschwitz, this is especially problematic, given its provenance.
“This is what we wanted to explore in this exhibition, which also allows us to extend our gaze to the present, to question ourselves if we have really known how to see Auschwitz after everything that happened from 1945 onwards.”
Auschwitz camps alias Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz, which was established in 1940, was the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps located in southern Poland. It initially served as a detention centre for political prisoners and later became a major site of the Nazis’ final solution to the Jewish question.
At these camps, people were beaten, tortured and executed for the most trivial reasons. More than 1.1-million men, women, and children lost their lives.
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