Queensborough Community College opens Holocaust exhibit
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A new exhibit at Queensborough Community College explores the history of the Holocaust. Photo courtesy of CUNY
By Rachel Vick
Queensborough Community College is opening up a new exhibit, exploring the Holocaust, the Nazi’s rise to power and the devastation caused by Adolf Hitler and his followers.
“The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” at the Kupferberg Center features first-person accounts from survivors of the Holocaust, artifacts and photos to bring the past into the present.
“The point of the center is to be able to understand how this one wretched part of history is not only relevant, but in many ways continues to play out in our society in a multitude of ways because there is a continuum from hatred and scapegoating to mass atrocities and genocide,” said Executive Director Dr. Laura Cohen. “If we want to inspire students to make change in our society, the only way we can do that is if we fully understand and appreciate history and see that it’s not some distant past.”
A team of curators, faculty members and students spent two years creating the physical exhibition and an interactive online tour.
Part of the intention behind the exhibition is to put the degree of terror and trauma into persepctive for students who might otherwise be unaware of the history.
Alexia Wang, a QCC student working on a masters in museum studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, said that working on the exhibit expanded her knowledge of the subject and that the lessons ring true today.
“We know that hatred and discrimination can be taught and so we can also teach social equality. That is why education of the Holocaust is so important,” Wang said. “We have to let people know the brutal history of the Nazis and where those ideas came from and how it was done. Because the Holocaust is our shared history. Genocide is still going on and plaguing many countries and bigotry has never been eradicated in American society.”
The center said the 20 foot map installed alongside the exhibit is too small to show all 44,000 locations and camps used for forced labor and mass murder. Halls of the exhibit are decorated to evoke the buildings, and videos with stories and footage.
“The Kupferberg Holocaust Center has long been one of our city’s most effective leaders in sustaining the memory of that dark period so that today’s students and future generations understand the consequences of antisemitism as well as ethnic hatred, racism and bigotry against all groups and in all forms,” said CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez.
“This new exhibition is difficult and sobering but so important. Its relevance to today’s world, and this week’s horrors in Ukraine, is all too clear,” he added. “And it is a prime example of the many ways that CUNY community colleges draw on their campuses’ rich resources to do something ambitious, engaging their neighborhoods and boroughs and contributing to the shared culture of New York City.”
