Kansas City Auschwitz exhibit can cure you of dumb, deeply hurtful Nazi comparisons

One of the first things you see when you enter the exhibition opening soon at Union Station, “Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away,” is a copy of the Jan. 28, 1945 New York Times reporting that the death camp had been liberated by Russian soldiers.

The front-page headline on the edition that’s on display is “Red Army Rolls on in Drive for Berlin.” OK, understated by modern standards, but let’s see, what does it say about Auschwitz? It’s … not there. Not mentioned at all in the portion of the story that takes up much of the front page.

Instead, there are exactly two sentences, deep in the part of the report that was continued on Page 3, noting that soldiers had “captured Oświęcim,” the town’s name in Polish, where half of the population was Jewish before World War II. And Oświęcim, the Times story said, was the “site of the most notorious German death camp in all Europe. An estimated 1,500,000 persons are said to have been murdered in the torture chambers at Oświęcim.”

This is gutting for a few reasons: First, how were initial reports of skeletal survivors, piles of corpses and evidence of the million Jews and others who had been murdered there, by the German state, not considered front-page news?

The liberation of Auschwitz was not even a story in its own right, and merited only a fleeting mention. Yet what it does say shows what a lie it was that the world didn’t know exactly what had been going on there.

If it’s “the most notorious death camp in all Europe,” well then everyone knew, or could have known. The story even got the number who had been gassed to death there — it was 1.1 million, actually — closer to correct than if the general contours of the Holocaust had been at all mysterious just one day after Russian soldiers arrived in Oświęcim.

The scale of what those soldiers found — tons of human hair, and mountains of clothing — comes through powerfully in the exhibition, but so does the personal, individual tragedy of the woman who left behind the single, elegant, low-heeled red leather shoe that’s on display.

Everyone who can should by all means see this stunning collection of artifacts, so sensitively assembled by its director, Luis Ferrreiro, in partnership with Union Station CEO George Guastello, that no yellow lights are used, so as not to invoke the yellow badges that Jews were made to wear.

But we’d particularly like to invite those who more than 75 years after the liberation of Europe’s most notorious death camp still have not bothered to learn what happened there.

A recent 50-state survey of adults under 40 found that 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and 11% said they believe Jews caused the Holocaust.

But we mainly know that ignorance on this subject remains rampant among all age groups because those who don’t care to know keep making this obvious.

Anti-Laura Kelly cartoon ignorant, offensive

Last summer, you might remember, a GOP county chairman in Kansas ran a cartoon in the weekly newspaper he owns, The Anderson County Review, that showed Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly sending Jews off to Nazi death camps because she was trying to keep Kansans from getting COVID-19. “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask … and step onto the cattle car,” the cartoon said.

At first, that Republican chairman, Dane Hicks, said anyone criticizing him was just one of those “liberal Marxist parasites” and “my enemy.” But later, he said he’d learned something from the Jewish community leaders who had spoken to him about why the cartoon was so repugnant. “It’s apparent I previously lacked an adequate understanding of the severity of their experience and the pain of its images,” he said.

That putting a piece of paper over your mouth and nose for the purpose of saving lives should never be compared to the slaughter of six million people for the purpose of making Jews extinct is not something anyone should need to have spelled out.

Yet this just keeps happening. Barack Obama was often compared to Hitler, and so was Donald Trump.

Only last month, far-right U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Democrats are “just like” Nazis. She also said that asking vaccinated employees to wear a logo that says that is “just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

After the owner of a Nashville hat store posted a picture of herself in a yellow Star of David that said, “not vaccinated,” Stetson withdrew its franchise and the owner said, “I sincerely apologize for any insensitivity.”

Throughout the decade that former state Rep. Stacey Newman served in the Missouri House, she said, her colleagues regularly dragged Hitler and Nazis into unrelated debates, perpetually unaware of how hurtful that was, despite her efforts to tell them.

“It was an underlying current the whole time I was there,” said Newman, who was the sole Jewish member of the Missouri House by the time she left in 2018.

Even a lifetime of learning about the Holocaust won’t clear up the mystery of evil. It can’t explain how those SS officers photographed on what sure looks like a carefree day off from overseeing the Auschwitz crematoria could have enjoyed a jolly singalong. Nor can it tell us how the commandant of the camps, Rudolf Höss, could have claimed that “My family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled. The children could live free and easy. My wife had her flower paradise. … There was always something new and interesting in the garden.”

But see this exhibition, which opens on June 14, and you will see, as Luis Ferreiro says, that “the most horrific part of the story is understanding that these perpetrators were not from Mars.”

You will be made to see what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi meant when he said that, “It happened, therefore it can happen again: This is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.” Which does not mean it is happening again because we feel oppressed by having to wear a mask or get vaccinated or pay taxes.

See this exhibition, and you will know why, as Stacey Newman says, “there’s no excuse for equating Hitler with anything.”