{"id":58551,"date":"2020-01-29T14:49:16","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T21:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=58551"},"modified":"2020-01-31T09:26:20","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T16:26:20","slug":"exhibit-travels-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/exhibit-travels-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"NAU\u2019s Martin-Springer Institute uses Holocaust exhibit to bring people from around the world together"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Six-year-old Zimmerman dyed his hair for this picture that appeared in his Paraguayan passport. Circa 1944.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

George Zimmerman was born Oct. 20, 1933, in Poland. Six years later, came anyone\u2019s worst nightmare\u2014war.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman and his Jewish family tried to keep a low profile, residing next to a slaughterhouse where screams of animals haunted him until being forced to the B\u0119dzin Ghetto, one of the many ghettos set up by Nazi Germany for Polish Jews. There, his family and 40 others hid in the attic for more than a week before being discovered and captured by army officers. They managed to escape captivity and fled to Budapest, Hungary, only to be caught again and transported to the Sered labor camp in Slovakia. In November 1944, Zimmerman and his family were deported to Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

This is just one of dozens of stories to surface because of the exhibit, \u201cThrough the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the B\u0119dzin Ghetto,\u201d a product of Northern Arizona University\u2019s Martin-Springer Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Preserving and understanding the Holocaust in its entirety is exactly why the Martin-Springer Institute was created, and this exhibit has been a long time coming. Founded in 2000 by Ralph and Doris Martin<\/strong>, the institute was built to raise awareness of human rights by remembering the stories of injustice, such as Poland\u2019s ghettos, through the use of seminars, public speakers, exhibits and applied research opportunities.<\/p>\n

After the Martin-Springer Institute was established, professor and director of the institute Bj\u00f6rn Krondorfer <\/strong>and former professor Martin Kalb<\/strong> had hopes to create an exhibit that exposed the realities of the ghetto in B\u0119dzin as a way to honor Doris Martin, a Holocaust survivor. More than just a small showcase that people could see when they passed through Flagstaff, Krondorfer and Kalb wanted to create something with a much further reach\u2014an exhibit that would travel the world.<\/p>\n

\"Krondorfer<\/a>
Krondorfer works with students to conduct research for the exhibit.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the help of 12 NAU interdisciplinary students, recruited to dig through archives of Poland\u2019s history and conduct interviews about the Holocaust, \u201cThrough the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the B\u0119dzin Ghetto\u201d was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cConducting research was the easy part,\u201d said NAU alumnus Justin Bigelow,<\/strong> who was studying to receive his bachelor\u2019s degree in history when he was selected for the project. \u201cCollaborating with a group of people from different backgrounds was a little more challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the challenges, the exhibit that came out of the research and collaboration was worth it, Bigelow said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was really rewarding to work with a group of people that cared, and I mean genuinely gave a damn about the story we were trying to tell,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 14, 2014, the exhibit was unveiled. It traveled throughout Arizona, and eventually made its way across the United States. Following its unveiling, a new team of undergraduates began converting the exhibit into digital media, a process that would take more than two years. Thanks to their efforts, glimpses into the 1940s B\u0119dzin Ghetto can now be seen online<\/a>\u2014fuzzy, tattered, black-and-white photographs depict crowds of people, furniture piled in alleyways, some people caught candidly and others who stare blankly into the camera lens.<\/p>\n

\"Poland<\/a>
The exhibit, translated into Polish, displayed in Sosnowiec.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Digitization continued as the exhibit made its way to the East Coast. In 2018, while on display at a synagogue in Riverdale, New York, Krondorfer spoke to Holocaust survivors and their descendants from B\u0119dzin and the surrounding area. Word of the exhibit reached Monika Kempara, curator of an art center in Poland, who then worked with Krondorfer to translate the text of the exhibit into Polish and insert it into the graphic files for printing. That spring, the exhibit traveled overseas to Kempara\u2019s hometown of Sosnowiec\u2014a sister city of B\u0119dzin and former ghetto of the war some 80 years earlier\u2014and was displayed along the fence of the local soccer fields.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore than just a way to honor Doris who lived as an adolescent girl in B\u0119dzin, this exhibit focuses on young people in a specific location (a mid-sized industrial town in Poland) and humanizes the impersonal number of millions of Holocaust victims,\u201d Krondorfer said. \u201cCreating the exhibit\u2014and later the accompanying website\u2014shows how young people negotiated restrictive, brutal and eventually genocidal times. It offers a glimpse into their daily lives, their struggles, but also shows their spirited resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"before-the-war-panel\"<\/p>\n

Now traveling internationally, the exhibit continues to grow in popularity. With it came the outpouring of stories from survivors of the Holocaust, along with their children, who stepped forward to offer additional resources, information and personal contributions to the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman was one of them.<\/p>\n

Unlike many of the Holocaust victims, including his father and grandfather who died during the death march<\/a>, Zimmerman was alive to share his story and contribute his experience to the exhibit. In 1944 when he and his family arrived to Auschwitz, the gas chambers had been discontinued four days prior. There, they stayed until they were liberated from the Soviet Army. In 1950, Zimmerman and his mother emigrated to New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale University and became a professor of physics at Boston University. Read his full story online.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A Jewish family wades through the rubble strewn courtyard in the ghetto of Kamionka.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In May, the exhibit will be showcased in the Center of the Holocaust and Genocide located in Johannesburg, South Africa, where a large group of B\u0119dzin Jews settled and where their descendants still reside.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis exhibit set a new direction in how to involve NAU students in meaningful public history and public humanities projects\u2014projects that reach people\u2019s hearts and minds not only on campus and in our community, but also regionally and, as we can see with this exhibit, internationally,\u201d Krondorfer said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone at NAU at the time thought such a global reach and expansion would be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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George Zimmerman was born Oct. 20, 1933, in Poland. Six years later, came anyone\u2019s worst nightmare\u2014war. Zimmerman and his Jewish family tried to keep a low profile, residing next to a slaughterhouse where screams of animals haunted him until being forced to the B\u0119dzin Ghetto, one of the many ghettos set up by Nazi Germany…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":58553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}