Ralph Blumenthal

NEW YORK — Mass murder takes central planning.

Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates the first traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust.

Well-timed, during a worldwide surge of anti-Semitism, the harrowing installation opened Wednesday — the anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe — over three floors of the Museum of Jewish Heritage at the Battery, in sight of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It strives, successfully, for fresh relevance, starting with its haunting rubric: “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.”

In other words, as the author Primo Levi, a camp survivor, famously warned, “It happened, therefore it can happen again.”

From 1940 to 1945, at the vast complex covering almost 16 square miles in conquered Poland near the little town of Oswiecim, some 1.1 million Jews and 200,000 Poles, Russians, Roma and other non-Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

Many were worked to death in factories including a plant that made synthetic rubber. The SS calculated the profit from each prisoner’s slave labor at $745, almost $11,000 today. The exhibition also includes a startling find — half an original barracks from the Monowitz labor camp, the part of the Auschwitz complex where Levi and Elie Wiesel were imprisoned.

But 900,000 of those who arrived were never admitted to Auschwitz or its nearly 50 subcamps. They were sent directly from sealed boxcars to the complex’s gas chambers and crematories, ovens with a combined daily capacity of incinerating precisely 4,416 corpses.

“By the end of the war,” says the museum audio guide, “90% of Jewish children in occupied Europe had been murdered.”

From the moment visitors approach the museum, it’s clear what’s coming. Parked outside the building’s hexagonal ziggurat, evocative of a Star of David, is a Deutsche Reichsbahn railway car, one of 120,000 built between 1910 and 1927, to haul freight and cattle. They soon were put into service carrying human beings to their deaths.

By making the most notorious Nazi camp a stand-in for the Holocaust, the exhibition offers a tighter focus than that of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Its power is in the containment of its narrative to a set of artifacts left behind by individuals who came to a specific place of horror.

The pathos is captured in the details evoked by the many items on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, which received a fee from the Spanish company Musealia, the for-profit organizer of the exhibition. Here a colossal wheel set from a freight train locomotive. There a woman’s lone scarlet party shoe. Industrial strength meets fragile humanity.

First shown in Madrid, where it drew some 600,000 visitors, it will be in New York through at least January before moving on.

The bleakness is leavened with uplifting episodes of resistance, devotion and faith. The 1944 escape of two Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, whose eyewitness accounts, the “Auschwitz Protocols,” sounded a largely ignored alarm. The heroic if doomed uprising in October 1944 of the Sonderkommandos, prisoners pressed into duty handling the corpses. And the inspired action of Siegfried Fedrid, a young Viennese tailor forced with 60,000 fellow prisoners to evacuate the camp in a death march as the Red Army approached. He snatched a blanket and shared it with four companions, saving their lives and his.

The exhibition, with its 700 objects and 400 photographs and drawings from Auschwitz; 30 other lenders; and the museum’s own collection, avoids simplistic cause and effect. Rather, it illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, “there is no why.”

It properly spotlights the perpetrators as well as the victims. There are photos of the family of the camp commandant Rudolf Höss at play. A rogue’s gallery of the camp’s leadership fills a wall, across from some of the 30,000 salvaged mug shots of prisoners. One array includes Charlotte Delbo, 29, sent to Auschwitz with 229 other French resistance fighters. Only 49 survived.

The exhibition also juxtaposes filmed reminiscences of survivors with period footage of the deportations and, later, the life-and-death-selections at the Auschwitz arrival Rampewhere trainloads of up to 5,000 men, women and children at a time would be herded out in chaos and terror. It preserves their testimony and makes it accessible to younger generations without resorting to the Instagram recreations that drew tremendous audiences in Israel but also some criticism from those who said they trivialized the Holocaust.

The installation in Manhattan, curated by the leading Auschwitz historian Robert Jan van Pelt, was replete with challenges. How do you objectify evil? Glassed-in artifacts like the three-tier bunks where ill and starving prisoners slept two or more to a billet, head to toe, seem incongruently antiseptic. An adjustable steel chaise for medical experiments on humans is particularly chilling.

Conversely, it’s hard to showcase gleaming accouterments like SS belt buckles, Hitler Youth bugles and ebony daggers without glamorizing the Nazi penchant for using bold iconography on flags and uniforms to convey an aura of romance, power and invincibility.

Anti-Semitism, actually, had infected German society long before the Nazis, a point made by the display of a proclamation by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in 1551 ordering Jews to wear a yellow circle on their clothing. The document was proudly presented to Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring in 1940.

Hitler’s rise is depicted and explained in the context of a German society fractured in the aftermath of World War I, with burning resentments over reparations to the victors, and rampant inflation that left a 1 trillion mark note worth barely $15.

One entire wall is given over to a photo mural of a 1933 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, with an overhead monitor beaming silent excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s worshipful documentary, “Triumph of the Will.” Delirious crowds lining the road hail Hitler in regimented adulation, but the camera also picks out bystanders. They are ordinary Germans, says the audio guide. “They’ve chosen to take part.”

Some Germans, the exhibition points out, resisted the pull of Nazism and their opposition could sway policy. A glass case displays the white smock and thermometer of Georg Renno, senior doctor of Hartheim Castle in Austria where mentally and physically disabled Germans and Poles were euthanized. When news of the mass murders leaked in 1941, the program was halted due to protests, although it secretly started up again, claiming a total of 200,000 lives.

The exhibition traces how German leaders, meeting for 90 minutes on Jan. 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, settled on the Final Solution — the killing of the carefully tabulated 11 million Jews remaining in Europe. Some 800,000 had already been murdered, mostly by mobile killing units, and the toll would ultimately reach 6 million. Six killing centers were designated, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, originally designated to hold Soviet POWs. An underground morgue was converted into a gas chamber. Four others with connecting crematories followed.

When even these proved insufficient, bodies were burned in outdoor pits. One Sonderkommando, Alberto Errera, risked his life to photograph it — actual graphic images of mass killings at Auschwitz.

Artifacts from the gas chambers and crematories are some of the most charged in the exhibition. A wire mesh column to lower Zyklon B pellets into the gas chamber away from desperate victims’ hands is a reproduction, as are the gas chamber doors. They were hinged to open out as bodies piled up inside in frantic efforts to escape. The original doors were destroyed when the retreating Germans blew up the buildings. But a rake for ashes and the heavy iron crematory latches, fabricated by the ovenmaker Topf &amp; Sons, survive, as does a rare fake showerhead used to persuade the doomed that they were entering a bathhouse, not a death chamber soon to fill with Zyklon B.

Developed as a pesticide to emit cyanide, the gas could take up to 24 hours to kill lice, the exhibition notes. Humans, just 15 minutes.

Sonderkommandos working 12-hour shifts gave instructions in the undressing rooms, hauled bodies from the gas chambers to the hoists, cut hair, extracted gold teeth and loaded the ovens. Five trains daily carried the loot from Auschwitz to Germany.

Left behind were the artifacts that gave witness, like a child’s shoe displayed in one small case. The sock is stuffed inside it.

Who puts a sock in his shoe? Someone who expects to retrieve it.

Exhibit Information:

“Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.”

Through January 2020 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; 646-437-4202, mjhnyc.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/design/auschwitz-exhibition-review-holocaust.html" id="a71aa31d-77ba-3c30-a61e-4ef00f2f834e">The New York Times</a>.

A Visit to the Unfathomable Past of Auschwitz

(Critic’s Pick)

These stories of the persistence of hope even in mankind’s darkest moments have been passed down despite limited evidence and eyewitness detail.

But could camp prisoners have found ways to sound these horns, piercing the heavens with soblike wails and staccato blasts, without putting themselves in immediate mortal danger?

Now a new account that addresses that question, and is embraced by several historians as reliable, has emerged from the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, along with one of the secreted shofars itself.

Judith Tydor Schwartz, an expert on the Holocaust, said her father, Chaskel Tydor, a longtime prisoner entrusted as work dispatcher at one of the more than 40 Auschwitz subcamps, contrived on Rosh Hashana 1944 to send fellow prisoners on a distant detail where they might safely, and privately, pray. He did not know that they carried something with them. But when they returned, she said, one confided to her father that a shofar had been produced and blown.

What is more, according to the account of Schwartz, who directs Holocaust research at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, her father was given the shofar for safekeeping in 1945 by a fellow prisoner as the Nazis emptied the camp and fled advancing Russians.

On Monday, a week before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year 5780 and 75 Rosh Hashanas since that clandestine act of faith, that ceremonial ram’s horn, about 10 inches long with a right-angled curve like a smoking pipe, will be installed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park in Manhattan, New York. It is part of “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,” a traveling exhibition from Poland.

While it may never be possible to fully corroborate the story of the museum’s shofar, Holocaust historians said it is credible, and resembles other witness accounts of concentration camp shofars and is more detailed.

Schwartz said she was loaning the shofar as additional evidence of the lengths to which imprisoned Jews went to practice their religion in the face of their German tormentors.

Their efforts included the mouthing of blessings during beatings and the trading away of bread rations during Passover when leavened products are forbidden. Abandoned oil drums at Auschwitz, the complex of extermination and forced labor camps in German-occupied Poland where about 1.1 million victims perished, were used in place of traditional huts for contemplation during the harvest festival of Sukkot. Rabbis in the camp decreed that even one minute spent inside was a sufficient mitzvah, or good deed.

And then there were shofars whose bleats are meant to variously evoke Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram in place of his son Isaac, the summoning of the Israelites to Sinai for Moses’ giving of the law, and the most fervent expression of Jewish hope — “next year in Jerusalem.”

An installation opened last summer, “Through the Lens of Faith,” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, Poland, cites a 14-year-old prisoner, Wolf Greenbaum, who saw a rabbi visiting a doomed barrack at Birkenau on Rosh Hashana 1944 and blowing a smuggled shofar there.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem displays a shofar fabricated in 1943 in the Nazi labor camp of Skarzysko-Kamienna. In Auschwitz, said Robert Jan van Pelt, a Holocaust scholar and chief curator of the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s exhibition, “We know from a number of eyewitness testimonies that shofars were blown.”

But where and how were they hidden? How did they make their way into the camps? And how did their sounding go unpunished? Accounts say guards were bribed and distracted by prisoners.

“If it’s one thing I know from all the thousands of survivors I interviewed,” Schwartz said this week, “it’s that the impossible was possible, both to the bad and the good.”

Some shofars likely arrived in Auschwitz in mid-1944 with the 440,000 deported Hungarian Jews. Their belongings, left at the camp’s railway platform known as the ramp where arrivals were selected to live or die, were stockpiled at Birkenau in an immense goods warehouse dubbed “Canada” whose loot was often smuggled out. Schemes were hatched in the repulsive latrines, where guards disdained to enter.

Jack Kliger, president and chief executive officer of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the child of Holocaust survivors, said he remembers hearing from a friend of his parents that a shofar had sounded at Auschwitz.

“If there’s an artifact that symbolizes the Jewish soul,” Kliger said, “you’d be hard-pressed to find something more indicative than a shofar.”

Curators said it will be placed in a case with another rare treasure — a prayer shawl, rescued by another prisoner of Auschwitz and on loan from the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn. The shofar will be blown at a ceremony Monday at the museum and at New Year’s services at congregations in Manhattan.

The Auschwitz exhibition opened last May and has so far drawn about 95,000 visitors. It is set to move out in January unless extended.

Schwartz’s story came to light after she visited the newly opened exhibition and mentioned her father’s account to the curator, van Pelt. She said she still had the shofar. Had it ever before occurred to her to offer it to a museum? “Oh, God no,” she said, “we used it.”

Her father, a modest man, never revealed much in interviews she conducted with him before he died in 1993 at 89. But until the end of his life, she said, “the Auschwitz shofar accompanied his wanderings.” He ran a travel agency in Manhattan, married his secretary, Shirley Kraus, who became the mother of Schwartz, managed uranium mines in Montana and South Dakota, and eventually moved back to Israel.

Born in 1903 in Bochnia, Poland, near Krakow, her father and his Hasidic family fled to Germany during World War I. Living in Frankfurt as Hitler rose to power and war loomed in 1939, he and his wife, Bertha, sent their young son and daughter to safety on a Kindertransport to Belgium. Tydor was arrested later that year and imprisoned in Buchenwald, one of the first and largest concentration camps, near Weimar in central Germany. From there in October 1942 he was transported to Auschwitz III, the forced labor camp also known as Monowitz/Buna where authors Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel were also held. Within several miles stood the gas chambers and crematories of Auschwitz II, Birkenau.

In the camp he learned that Bertha Tydor, fleeing Germany for Poland, had been caught and murdered in Auschwitz, along with other family members. In despair, he was restrained from killing himself on the camp’s electrified wire. He was initially assigned to a construction detail carrying large sacks of cement, leaving him with a permanently disabled shoulder. But as an older prisoner with experience in the camps, he was designated a block secretary, responsible for assigning work details. By attaching names of the dead to some assignments, he was able to afford others relief in the sick bay, “enabling him to save hundreds of Jewish prisoners,” Schwartz said.

Around Rosh Hashana 1944, she said, he arranged to send some religious prisoners out where they might constitute a minyan, or quorum of 10 adults to conduct a prayer service. When they returned, he learned about the shofar’s sounding.

“I was told of the person who had it but when asked he denied, maybe from fear,” Tydor told his daughter in a recollection quoted in one of her books.

In January 1945, the Germans hurriedly began dynamiting Auschwitz and emptying the camp as the Russians approached. Tydor and some 60,000 other survivors were herded on a 30-mile march to another subcamp. But the night before they left, she said, another prisoner came up to him — “my father never said who it was” — and pressed on him a rag-wrapped object. The shofar.

Her father told her the man had said: “I’m going to die on this march. If you live, take this shofar. Tell them we blew the shofar at Auschwitz.”

Tydor survived the march and ended up back in Buchenwald where he was liberated by the U.S. Army on April 11, 1945. Later that year, he joined a group of former concentration camp prisoners and other freed Jews aboard the steamship Mataroa to Palestine, then under British mandate, and soon to become Israel.

Off the coast of Haifa on Rosh Hashana 1945, he blew the shofar.

This article originally appeared in

An Improbable Relic of Auschwitz: a Shofar That Defied the Nazis

For years there have been fragmentary reports of almost unbelievable acts of faith at the Nazi death camps during World War II: the sounding of shofars, the ram’s horn trumpets traditionally blown by Jews to welcome the High Holy Days.

<h1>When Richard Gergel was elevated to the federal judiciary by President Barack Obama in 2010, he found himself assigned to the Charleston, South Carolina, courtroom of an illustrious predecessor, J. Waties Waring, who had changed the course of American constitutional law.</h1>

Few — including Gergel — knew much about him.

The paradox was not lost on Gergel, a lifelong South Carolinian well versed in local history. But soon, using his knowledge of court procedures and FBI records and the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, he was on a crusade.

Now, despite judicial duties that included the 2017 trial of Dylann Roof, the young white supremacist sentenced to death for massacring nine African-American worshippers at a Charleston church, Gergel has written a book about a largely forgotten racial atrocity that turned a Confederate soldier’s son into an improbable giant of civil rights jurisprudence. (Gergel would not comment on the Roof trial.)

The book is “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring.” To be published Tuesday by the Sarah Crichton Books imprint of Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, “Unexampled Courage” reinvestigates an unpunished crime that, in Gergel’s telling, ignited the modern civil rights movement — including Truman’s desegregation of the military and the Supreme Court’s historic ruling overturning school segregation.

“I stumbled across the story and stumbled across Truman’s role,” said Gergel, 64, on a recent visit to New York. “It was a case that not only woke up Waties Waring, it woke up Truman.”

“There was no one like him,” he said of Waring. “In the South in the 1940s, there was a sense that something had to change but no one could figure out how to break the Gordian knot of Jim Crow.”

What turned a Southern gradualist into a revolutionary? “I started digging,” the judge said. Beyond the book, his quest ended in a 2015 renaming of the Charleston federal courthouse as the J. Waties Waring Judicial Center.

The backdrop of the Woodard case was harrowing. On Feb. 12, 1946, Army Sgt. Isaac Woodard, 26, discharged with a chest of medals after three years of fighting in the Pacific in a segregated unit during World War II, boarded a Greyhound bus from Camp Gordon, in Augusta, Georgia, en route to home in Winnsboro, South Carolina.

There were conflicting accounts of what happened on that bus. Joyous soldiers, black and white, may have been sharing a celebratory bottle of whiskey. Woodard and the driver argued about restroom breaks and Greyhound’s rules requiring a driver to accommodate passengers’ needs.

When the bus stopped in Batesburg, a small town about 30 miles from Columbia, the state capital, the driver summoned the town’s two police officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and his deputy, Elliot Long, and Woodard was ordered off the bus.

Shull admitted using his blackjack on the sergeant. When Woodard wrested it away, Long, gun drawn, ordered him to drop it. Then, by the Gergel book’s account, Shull rained blows on Woodard so ferociously the blackjack broke. Woodard was left sightless, both eyes gouged out, and thrown in jail, igniting a racial fuse that would burn its way across America to Waring, the White House and eventually the Supreme Court.

“It’s more than just an incident, it’s a huge historical moment,” said Patricia Sullivan, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of “Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.”

As a law student at Duke University in the 1970s, Gergel had read of Waring. But passing mention of Woodard escaped him and he didn’t think much of Waring again until, as an intellectual property and personal injury lawyer and outside counsel to the city of Columbia, he was named to the federal bench.

“In my installation talk, I spoke about Judge Waring,” Gergel recalled. “I saw blank looks.”

He plunged into research, using his inside knowledge of court dockets and evidentiary records. “I understood what I was looking at,” he said. “I knew what to ask for.”

Waring, Gergel found, was an eighth-generation Charlestonian born in 1880, with ancestry going back to slaveholders and colonists who arrived in the 1600s. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Charleston, and with the support of racially demagogic Sen. Ellison Smith, D-S.C., was named by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of three judges on the district court in 1942.

His first years on the bench were undistinguished. But in 1944, Waring settled a case in favor of a black teacher paid less than white counterparts, astonishing her NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, later the first African-American Supreme Court justice. In a second equal-pay case, Waring ruled for the black plaintiff, under the prevailing separate-but-equal doctrine.

Woodard, meanwhile, was convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct and settled his $50 fine with his last $44 cash. Doctors pronounced him irretrievably blind, and the government disclaimed responsibility as he had been discharged from the military five hours before his injury.

Outrage built as news of the assault spread through what was then called the Negro press, attuned to anger over the 900,000 black veterans who had fought for democracy abroad and were now demanding it at home. Orson Welles denounced the beating on his national radio show. Joe Louis, Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Woody Guthrie and other stars staged a benefit in Harlem where Woodard spoke.

In various archives, including NAACP files, Gergel found overlooked material on the reaction of Truman, who told an aide: “Enough is enough. Dammit, I’m going to do something immediately.” Truman directed the Justice Department and the FBI to pursue a criminal civil rights case against Shull. The case fell to Waring, who was skeptical of any federal role in enforcing racial justice and ready to dismiss the charges. But prosecutors were pressed to proceed and the trial began in November 1946.

Woodard testified that Shull had driven the handle end of the blackjack into each eye. Shull countered that Woodard had attacked him without provocation and that in self-defense he had struck Woodard a single blow. Medical records never introduced in court but later tracked down by Gergel and shown to a pathologist confirmed Woodard’s account.

The trial took one day. The all-white jury came back in 28 minutes to pronounce Shull not guilty. Waring, troubled by a bungled prosecution, called the sham trial his “baptism of fire.” Later, asked what changed him, Waring told reporters, “While on the bench, I developed a passion for justice.”

The following year, Waring ruled that the Democratic Party had to open its whites-only primary to black voters. He sent a white farmer to prison for a year for forcing an indebted sharecropper to work without pay, a form of enslavement commonly winked at by Southern courts. He issued orders enforcing black voting rights and with more blacks appearing on juries, desegregated the jury box.

And in 1951, driven to search for a strategy to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling legalizing segregation as long as the races were treated equally, Waring persuaded Marshall, still representing the NAACP, to present “a frontal attack” on segregation in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Henry Briggs, a black gas station attendant in Summerton, South Carolina, claiming that white children got bus transportation to school while black children did not.

Waring was outvoted on a three-judge panel, but his forceful dissent attacking the policy as a violation of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection of the law, strategically propelled the case into the Supreme Court, where it was consolidated with similar cases and decided in 1954 as Brown v. Board of Education, overturning school segregation.

For his efforts, Waring was menaced by the Ku Klux Klan and threatened with impeachment. A cross was burned in his backyard. He required 24-hour protection.

Waring left South Carolina for New York, dying there in 1968 at 87. Woodard died in the Bronx at 73 in 1992.

Among Waring’s admirers, Gergel writes, was a young African-American minister who had masterminded a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He “will long be remembered,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “for his minority opinion has now become a majority opinion.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="3a242699-c097-4dde-84fb-8cb9caf8db36" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/books/richard-gergel-unexampled-courage-j-waties-waring-isaac-woodard-truman-martin-luther-king.html">The New York Times</a>.

Making the Case for a Civil Rights Predecessor

The paradox was not lost on Gergel, a lifelong South Carolinian well versed in local history. But soon, using his knowledge of court procedures and FBI records and the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, he was on a crusade.

Making the case for a civil rights predecessor

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Ralph Blumenthal

Articles written by the author

A Visit to the Unfathomable Past of Auschwitz

An Improbable Relic of Auschwitz: a Shofar That Defied the Nazis

Making the case for a civil rights predecessor