The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre has partnered with the embassies of Germany, Austria, Poland and Israel for the opening of the internationally acclaimed exhibition Seeing Auschwitz on Sunday.
Seeing Auschwitz is an exhibition of the German Nazi camp Auschwitz and the Holocaust, conceived and produced by Musealia in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The exhibit confronts the viewer with stark evidence of mass murder and the people who perished at the Auschwitz camps. It is a story told through 100 photographs, sketches and testimonies captured by perpetrators, victims and liberators.
“Today, our mental image of the camp, how we ‘see’ Auschwitz, is informed by a relatively small number of photographs taken from an even smaller number of sources. The exhibition asks us to look beyond their intentions to explore more fully what each photograph reveals, not only of the place and time, but of the photographers themselves.”
The exhibition will run from Sunday, November 13 to March 2023.
The opening includes speeches by ambassador of Israel Eli Belotsercovsky, ambassador of Germany Andreas Peschke, ambassador, minister, head of the political and economic department of the polish embassy Andrzej Kanthak and Jarosław Spyra, deputy ambassador of Austria Oliver Gruenbacher, and chair of board JHGC professor Michael Katz.
Iris Singer, a film producer and presenter, is set to top off the speeches with a special address.
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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