The Royal Ontario Museum’s new exhibition has arrived just in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of a concentration camp where 1.1 million men, women and children, were murdered, almost all of them Jews.

Auschwitz. Not Long ago. Not Far Away. features 500 artifacts—including items from pre-war Germany and Poland—as well as video testimony from survivors liberated on Jan. 27, 1945.

Its only Canadian stop will be in Toronto, at a time when knowledge about the Holocaust is fading, and demonstrators have yelled ‘Go back to Europe’ at Jewish people during protests against Israel.

The day before the official opening on Jan. 10, a lone protester marched in front of the ROM, with a sign that read ‘Gaza. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,’ satirizing the name of the show.

It’s a fraught moment to launch a multi-million-dollar exhibit about the Holocaust, but the museum CEO and director Josh Basseches says the time is right for the exhibit.

The museum surveyed the public before committing to the show and found interest was as high as a blockbuster exhibit on dinosaurs, Basseches said in an interview with The CJN.

“If anything, interest in the show went up after Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, and the subsequent, ongoing war in Gaza.

“It’s a sobering exhibit. Having the opportunity to understand about an event like this at a place like the ROM, which feels for many as a safe, comfortable place to be, makes it something that people want to do,” he said.

“The treatment is quite sensitive, it avoids sensationalism. It doesn’t have some of the most visceral and disturbing issues, because we wanted to make this an exhibition that could engage people of a wide variety of ages, and from any sort of different background…. As we move further from the Holocaust, whether you are Jewish, or not Jewish, the idea of being a witness, of being aware of an understanding of what happened, feels to me profoundly important.”

Between 325,000 and 350,000 people are expected to visit the Auschwitz exhibit, Basseches said. In 2017, the museum mounted The Evidence Room, an exhibit that, replicated the architecture of Auschwitz to demonstrate that the Nazis deliberately constructed and operated the extermination camp. That show received about 250,000 visitors.

 Auschwitz, which runs until Sept. 1, is housed in the angular Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The first object visitors encounter in the gallery area is a woman’s red dress shoe, brought by an unknown deportee to the camp. Along the wall are the concrete fence posts, at one time strung with electrified wire, that defined the boundaries of Auschwitz.

As Basseches promises, the exhibit largely shies away from the most grotesque photos of starving prisoners and piles of corpses.  Instead, the artifacts of deportees and the physical remains of the concentration camp, as well as video testimonies from survivors, explain the story of Auschwitz.

The display winds through the fourth-floor space, starting with the history of the town of Oswiecim, Poland, where Auschwitz was built, and the political and economic instability that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

Artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and 20 other institutions trace the persecution of Jews, and others, including the disabled, homosexuals and the Roma people, as well as their desperate attempts to find refuge outside Europe.

The show culminates with mass deportations in cattle cars, and ultimately the fate of prisoners sentenced to slave labour in the satellite camps, and death in the gas chambers and crematorium. Suitcases, broken eye glasses and household objects including a cheese grater, brightly painted mugs and spoons, which were all confiscated when people arrived in Auschwitz are displayed. A small, scuffed child’s shoe and sock are placed in their own glass display case.

Photographs of camp commander Rudolf Hoss’ children splashing in a pool outside the camp gates as well as mug shots of prisoners, and drawings of the camps by prisoners line the museum walls. The triple-tier wooden bunk bed, where inmates were crammed into barracks and the pipes used to deliver the deadly Zyklon-B gas to the victims in the gas chambers, disguised as showers, are at the centre of the exhibit.

The exhibit was designed by the Spanish company Musealia, which had previously produced museum shows about the Titanic and the human body, which featured actual corpses.

In an interview with The CJN, the day before the exhibit opened, curators and historians Paul Salmons, and Robert Jan van Pelt, and Luis Ferreiro, director of Musealia, discussed the exhibit and how it has evolved over the years.

The idea for the show began when Ferreiro read Man’s Search for Meaning, a seminal work by psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, but whose wife and child were murdered.

“Part of what I learned from Man’s Search for Meaning is that when you do things with your heart, there’s no explanation needed, or no justification. It was born from a moral need to do something after reading that book.”

Inspired to learn more, Ferreiro, contacted Van Pelt, a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo and an expert on Auschwitz, who had designed The Evidence Room at the ROM.

Ferreiro was willing to wager his family’s business on producing the exhibit, but he admits he was naïve and had much to learn.

Van Pelt sent Ferreiro, who is not Jewish, a reading list of 20 books, and told him to visit Auschwitz and Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Israel) before they began designing the current exhibit, which had its debut in Madrid in 2017. About 1.25 million people have seen the show so far, with more stops planned.

This particular exhibition is smaller than in other cities—Van Pelt laments that the ROM Crystal’s oddly-shaped walls resulted in less exhibition space—and some artifacts are not on display, including a cattle car which was used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz. The railcar has been displayed outside at other museums, but a secure spot could not be found at the Toronto museum, which is currently in the midst of a renovation.

Van Pelt says he argued for the cattle car to be placed outside but a little further away at Queen’s Park, the site of the provincial legislature. Whatever graffiti the railcar attracted, would have added to the story of the artifact, but since Musealia owned the cattle car and had paid for its restoration, it was not his decision.

The exhibit, however, has added a few pieces from survivors who came to Canada after the war, including a sculpture by Felix Kohn, which has never been displayed before, and two tiny charms crafted by Esther Friedlander, who was working in a slave labour factory and was sheltered by her friends when she was ill.

The ROM was also able to arrange for the loan of an unfinished painting from Amsterdam that had been done by Van Pelt’s great-uncle, who was killed in Auschwitz.

Each curator has an object in the collection that they find especially poignant.

Van Pelt is drawn to a tallit that belonged to Solomon Krieser, who grew up in the town of Oswiecim. It is a complicated object, since the artifact shouldn’t even be on display, he says.

Traditionally, a bar mitzvah boy receives one of these prayer shawls at age of 13 and is buried in it at his death. But in this instance, Krieser fled from Poland to France, where he and his family were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Before he was deported, he was able to smuggle the tallit to one of his daughters, who survived.

“So the fact that this very artifact exists and that we are able to show it, in some way shows the catastrophe, because it should not exist,” Van Pelt said.

British curator Paul Salmons, who has been involved with the exhibition since the start, points to an exhibit displayed for the first time in Toronto—two silver rings, each with a red heart in the centre, crafted in Auschwitz by Leon Kritzberg for himself and a woman he knew from before the war, Miriam Litman.

The pair found themselves on either side of the wire at Auschwitz and Kritzberg, a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, was able to pass goods to help Litman survive, Salmons says.

The rings are “symbolic as well as emblematic of the entire approach of exhibition, which is telling a story of mass inhumanity and destruction and dehumanization,” he says. “But throughout the exhibition we struggled also to re-humanize those people who were dehumanized, to show them as real, living people, as people who had loves and hopes and dreams and this is a form of resistance and resilience in Auschwitz that we were able to tell here for the first time.”

But even in the face of heartbreaking stories, the curators—who are immersed in Holocaust education—aim to let viewers draw their own lessons from the memory-laden artifacts.

“At no point in the exhibition do we moralize, not a single point, not even at the end, there is no point where we said, ‘Bad, bad Germans’ or ‘Never Again,’ or fight antisemitism, or any kind of direction,” says Van Pelt. “We do not give any direction for people of how to interpret the material, beyond the fact that we want them to pay attention and learn to pay attention.”

Holocaust education has been mandated for Ontario high schools since 2023, and many Grade 10 History classes are planning to visit the exhibit. There are valid reasons to study the Holocaust, but it can’t be the cure-all for antisemitism or historical amnesia, Salmons believes.

“It’s the most extensively documented, most intensively researched, best understood example of genocide in human history so far. So if you care at all about how and why mass violence happens and how societies can fall apart, it seems like it’s a good place to start,” he said.

“It seems to me that it’s perfectly reasonable that we would spend at least a few hours, a few lessons, examining that and reflecting upon it. That’s quite different though from using a difficult, traumatic emotionally challenging path to create a space where you tell young people what they should think about the world.”

Van Pelt says the curators did not approach donors and promise that they would create an exhibition that would counter Holocaust denial or diminish antisemitism. Rather, they intended to tell a compelling evidence-based story about Auschwitz.

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is that education by itself can’t prevent mass violence, Salmons points out. “We see that just over 80 years ago, a highly educated society that turned its resources against its neighbours and committed this genocide,” he said.

“If you’re serious about the cry of ‘never again’, then take it seriously and change the way you educate. It shouldn’t just be that when you arrive in a Holocaust lesson this is the first time that you talk about human rights or this is the way you stop prejudice or antisemitism. It can be a contribution, but it’s too big a burden to place on one visit to an exhibition or a few lessons in class.”

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