Auschwitz exhibit at the ROM defies expectations with real artifacts, but no images of corpses | Canada Voices

There are no photographs showing piles of emaciated bodies in the Auschwitz exhibition that opened at the Royal Ontario Museum Friday. There are, however, photos of piles of shoes.

“One big problem with any Holocaust exhibition is that people are very tense; they are afraid they are going to see mountains of corpses,” said Robert Jan van Pelt, the University of Waterloo architectural historian who curated the ROM show. “You need to keep people slightly off balance, with the surprise and the expected.”

So, one real shoe – a red ladies’ high heel posed against a photographic panel showing a mountain of shoes – will tick a box for many visitors. So will the three cement posts and barbed wire from the electrical fence at the death camp, on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. It is one of the key lenders for an international touring exhibition organized by the Spanish exhibit design company Musealia, which includes more than 500 original objects.

The surprise in this section is a Soviet military map of the area, dating to 1944 and annotated to show the camp and its satellites, which the Red Army liberated in January, 1945.

“If we have the Ws – why, how, where and so on – I was really interested in the where of Auschwitz,” van Pelt said. “We start with the location.”

This fits his background as an architectural historian, an expert on the gas chambers who used his research to debunk Holocaust denier David Irving in a notorious 2000 libel trial. Van Pelt is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor – his maternal grandmother lived in hiding in the Netherlands while her brother died at Auschwitz – and the show includes both her real and her forged identity card, as well as his great uncle’s last letter.

Yet he came to his life’s work through an odd coincidence. His PhD thesis was about the Jerusalem Temple, the foundational site of Judaism that was also central to Christian theology. During his thesis defence in his native Netherlands, van Pelt argued the temple was the most significant building of the last 2,000 years, when one examiner asked what structure would be as symbolically important 2,000 years in the future. Van Pelt made the only reply he could think of: Auschwitz.

He initially found it difficult to get work as a Holocaust specialist until Waterloo offered him a job. He arrived in Canada in 1987 and pursued his research, increasingly called on as an expert witness to counter Holocaust deniers. The Irving libel trial lead eventually to his museum work: He constructed The Evidence Room, an installation of forensic architecture, for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016 and showed it at the ROM in 2017. In 2013, he was also approached by Luis Ferreiro of Musealia with the idea for a larger show about Auschwitz.

“We only had an idea. We had no artifacts except a little collection that I had for my family. And so now the question is, how we’re going to create a travelling exhibition from scratch,” he said.

Eventually, van Pelt used his scholarly connections with the Auschwitz museum to secure the crucial loans that meant the show, which first opened in Madrid in 2017, would have material evidence from the death camp, including prisoners’ uniforms, the commandant’s desk and even parts of the gas chambers.

Although the stories that survivors tell in brief video clips are harrowing, the exhibition never forces the viewer to confront images of the dead or dying. For example, the infamous doctor Josef Mengele is represented by an original examination table and medical instruments, as well as a pair of shiny SS boots alongside a story told by one of his victims, a child who was at eye level with his boots.

The concept allows today’s children to see the exhibition: The ROM recommends it for ages 12 and up, and expects high public interest. Polled beforehand, respondents told the museum they would be as interested in a Holocaust exhibition as a show about the T-Rex.

“Whether it was a suitcase that was handled by a victim or whether it was the desk of a perpetrator or that these are the actual uniforms, the actual barracks, the actual spoons and forks that were used, I think that brings it home for people,” said ROM director Josh Basseches. “This is very meaningful and difficult material, and we want people to feel it in their hearts as well as their minds.”

The ROM is prepared for enthusiastic visitors, but it is also prepared for the wrong kind of attention. In an era where activists have targeted objects in museums, the ROM launched a pilot project last month using both metal detectors and bag checks at the entrance and may continue it after the show closes in September.

Another of van Pelt’s unexpected elements is the background about Osweicim, which the Germans renamed Auschwitz when they invaded Poland, a fateful event represented in the exhibit by an original road sign showing the new German name. The town in southern Poland was a railway junction with a well-established Jewish community helping passing migrants on their way to the port at Hamburg. The exhibition includes the candelabra excavated from the ruins of the Great Synagogue of Oswiecim in 2004. The community provided hostels, but there were also barracks for the Polish army, which would become the concentration camp.

After the war, construction materials were in such short supply that the camp buildings were distributed to bombed-out locals: Musealia was able to include the frame of an actual dormitory from one of the satellite camps by buying it from a Polish farmer, who had used it as a shed.

Although much edited from the larger Madrid presentation, the show is big enough that the ROM has split it into two sections in the awkwardly shaped galleries of its fourth floor. The first section leads the visitor through parallel developments of the 1930s, Nazism’s racist policies and the establishment of camps to imprison political enemies, until the two strands merge at Auschwitz.

This includes sections about the various other groups murdered by the Nazis, the disabled and the Roma-Sinti, or those merely hounded, including the Afro-German children born of relationships between German women and French African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after the First World War.

“Ninety per cent of the people murdered at Auschwitz were Jewish; 10 per cent were not,” van Pelt said. “The idea is to widen the discussion: It is not only about Jews.”

The second section deals with the heart of van Pelt’s research, featuring a reproduction of the door of the gas chamber and one of the actual gas nozzles disguised as shower heads, as well as a peep hole for looking into the crematorium oven and the steel door of the ash pit. There is also a large display of the last objects taken from deportees when they arrived, including kettles, cooking pots, cheese graters, enamel cups, cutlery, brushes, scissors, eye glasses and the buttons stripped from their clothing. These were the goods sent to the sorting sheds that the inmates gave the symbolic name of Kanada – a place of vast resources utterly out of reach.

Auschwitz. Not Long ago. Not far away. continues at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to Sept. 1.