A woman's shoe from an unknown deportee to Auschwitz is on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage A Living Memorial To The Holocaust Thursday, May 2, 2019. The shoe is part of the exhibit "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. " which opens to the public starting May 8. (Barry Williams/for New York Daily News)<doc-sep>NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A groundbreaking exhibition in New York is presenting a collection of original objects from Auschwitz. The historic artifacts are in America for the first time ever, reports CBS2’s Steve Overmyer. Ray Kaener was a teenager when she was taken to the infamous extermination camp. “The soldiers came to her hospital and started to throw the children into the trucks,” the Holocaust survivor said. “One day then the cattle car comes and we all marched in.” Web Extra: Museum Board Chair Explains New Exhibition On Thursday, Kaener was at the Museum of Jewish Heritage where the largest exhibition ever about Auschwitz was unveiled. It is a tribute to the 6 million Jews who died, but also a warning. “If we don’t take the lessons of what Auschwitz represents, and don’t understand where hate can lead, God forbid these things can happen again and they do in a certain measure,” said the museum’s George Klein. A decade of curation has delivered more than 700 items – and most importantly, first hand accounts and important of stories like Kaener’s. “To tell them they should carry on what I can’t do anymore, that this existed,” she said. “That this hate should never happen to any human being.” Web Extra: Largest U.S. Auschwitz Exhibition Unveiled Students from a local high school spent the day looking, learning, and listening. “I realize how important it is to hear from them in person and carry on their story,” said Lucy Doft, a junior at The Ramaz School. “It’s so important to hear exactly what they went through and how they felt. It’s nothing you can really learn in a classroom.” Children huddled around the survivors as they shared their tales. “You carry on because I’m not going to be here forever,” said Kaener. “There’s very few survivors around, so that’s why I’m speaking to you.” As the survivors dwindle, the young generation plays a big role in making sure the stories are not forgotten. The travelling exhibit opens to the public next Wednesday and runs through the end of the year. For more information, see the museum’s website at MJHNYC.org/exhibitions/auschwitz.<doc-sep>NEW YORK (JTA) — As a teenager, whenever my mother would suggest watching a Holocaust film, I would groan. I always felt that the Shoah already was close enough. My father had shown me the letters my great-grandfather wrote from a concentration camp in Poland to his daughter, who had managed to escape Austria before the deportations. At one point the letters just stopped, a fact too horrible for me to dwell on. I had learned, too, about the Holocaust in school, through my synagogue and Jewish camp. I felt inundated by the Shoah and had no desire to have it take over another aspect of my life. So when my editor asked me to cover a Holocaust-related exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in downtown Manhattan, I wasn’t thrilled. With more than 700 original items from Auschwitz and 400 photographs, the exhibition is the world’s largest-ever traveling exhibition about the Nazi death camp and promised an immersive experience that did not much appeal to me. But duty calls, so I signed on, joking to my friends that they better take me out for some drinks that night. I told them I was worried that the exhibition might suck me into a dark hole of sadness that would take days, if not weeks, to get out of. At the exhibition’s media preview on Thursday, I tell the chief curator, Robert Jan van Pelt, about my trepidation. “We try to tell the story in a way that it doesn’t incapacitate you,” says van Pelt, one of the world’s foremost experts on Auschwitz. “I think that it is good to be moved, to be touched at various occasions,” he continues. “And people get touched at different places, but ultimately you have to walk out of here with a renewed sense of purpose.” The final rooms of the exhibition, which is titled “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” and opens on May 8, deal with those who resisted the Nazis and the liberation of the camps. “It’s important for us also to stress that people are not simply only victims,” van Pelt says. That being said, the vast majority of the exhibition centers on the horrors that took place at the largest of the Nazi death camps. The hundreds of objects from the camp, located in Oswiecim, Poland, almost start to blend together. There are simply too many for me to focus on the tragedy that each of them represents. Among the objects is an original wooden barrack from Monowitz, a labor and concentration camp that was part of the Auschwitz complex. Inside, tools from the camp on display include a large kitchen pot and eating utensils. Next to that is a glass case with a wooden stretcher used to carry sick prisoners. The white fabric that stretches across the frame is still stained. In another glass case, I find myself looking at a yellowed undershirt with ritual fringes traditionally worn by observant Jewish men. This one was worn by an Auschwitz prisoner named Mendel Landau. A number of items that belonged to children — multicolored buttons, a shirt and onesie, a shabby looking doll — stand out. While noticing how plain and ordinary they look, I cannot help but think of the fate that their owners met shortly after the items were confiscated. The idea to assemble all these items — they come from 30 museums and private collections around the world — came to a non-Jewish Spaniard, Luis Ferreiro, in 2009. Ferreiro, from San Sebastian, says he was inspired both by his brother’s death a year earlier and the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which Viktor Frankl chronicles his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. “I remember closing the book and I had this feeling that you need to share that particular story,” Ferreiro tells me. His family owns Musealia, a company that specializes in traveling exhibitions, so he decided to use the format with which he was familiar. Early on in the process, Ferreiro approached Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim. “We never did any exhibition with a commercial firm, so we were surprised at the beginning, to be frank,” Cywinski tells me. “And never any traveling exhibition so huge. It was never done on the Holocaust.” But with time, he came to see it as a great opportunity to educate more people about the Holocaust. “In the last years, we observed, not only in Europe but in many countries in the world, a growing of anti-Semitism, a growing of xenophobia, of hate speech,” Cywinski says. “We got the impression that we must do something more, not only waiting in Auschwitz for the people that can come.” In December 2017 — nearly a decade after Ferreiro first had the idea — the exhibition premiered in Madrid, where it was extended twice and drew more than 600,000 visitors. New York is its second stop. Cywinski says the plan after the exhibition finishes its run here in January is to bring it elsewhere, though the location has yet to be set. Van Pelt, the chief curator who has been involved with the exhibition since the early planning stages, says the current political trends — what he describes as “the rise of populism, the rise of anti-Semitism, the rise of the hatred of foreigners” — make the exhibition resonate even more. “In a perverse way, we are lucky that this exhibition has become much more relevant politically and socially than originally we thought,” he says. But the exhibition doesn’t force any such connections. The phrase “Never again,” for example, does not appear. That was a conscious choice, van Pelt tells me. In teaching about the Holocaust, he avoids “moralizing” or telling people what to think, instead finding it more powerful to let them come to their own conclusions. Leaving the museum, I find myself clear minded. I haven’t descended into a black hole of sorrow. Having faced the largeness of the exhibition, I feel less frightened now of the Shoah’s power to overwhelm me. In a way, being confronted with the devastating effect of the Holocaust — millions of people killed, families destroyed — makes my own emotional state much less important. Will I now go to watch all those Holocaust movies I refused to see as a teenager? Probably not. But I text my father to ask for the name of the concentration camp where my great-grandfather was killed.<doc-sep>
NEW YORK (WABC) -- The largest exhibition on Auschwitz ever presented in the United States is about to open in New York City, featuring more than 700 original objects and 400 photographs never before seen in this country."Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." opens on May 8 at Museum of Jewish Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, located in Battery Park CityVisitors will experience artifacts mainly from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and more than 20 other lending institutions on view for the first time in North America.The exhibition includes hundreds of personal items that belonged to people killed in Auschwitz and to those who survived.Some of the items in the exhibit include a child's shoe stuffed with a sock, a gas mask worn by a prison guard, and the blue and white uniforms that marked the prisoners of Auschwitz.The Nazis put millions of Jews to death during World War II, including an estimated 90 percent of all Jewish children in occupied Europe. "It was inhuman, what they did to us,' 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Ray Kaner said. "There were times that I couldn't understand as a child. I used to punch myself, and ask myself, 'Am I in hell? '"For millions of Jews, the Holocaust ended at the death camps. But this exhibit starts at the beginning, with the rise of the Nazis in the years before the war. So visitors understand not only what happened, but why it happened. "It's difficult to go through, but it's important," museum Chairman Bruce Ratner said. "Sometimes we have to face evil things in order to understand. "Auschwitz did not start with gas chambers and crematoriums, and Hitler did not act alone. In one haunting photo, Auschwitz guards are serenaded by an accordion player.There are testimonials on video, original barbed-wire fencing, and even an operating table with surgical instruments used, historians say, for torture and human experimentation.The exhibit continues through the end of the year, serving as both a reminder and a warning. "I thought that the world would change after this, with all the cruelties and human behavior," Katner said "But it didn't. "The Museum of Jewish Heritage is the primary resource in the Tri-State area for teaching and learning about the Holocaust and is the third largest Holocaust museum in the world.It is located at Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Place, in Lower Manhattan.For tickets and additional information, visit mjhnyc.org ----------