Traveling national Holocaust exhibit now on display at KHCPL
Jul. 15—When Joe Rosenbach was an infant, his grandfather gave him a little brown stuffed Teddy bear as a gift.
It was Germany 1932; a few years before Rosenbach's life would change forever.
In November 1938, according to Tribune archives, Rosenbach and his family were roused in the middle of the night by two members of the German SS (Schutzstaffel) squad, a group of Nazi Germans reportedly established as Adolf Hitler's personal bodyguards.
The date would later be known as Kristallnacht — or the "Night of Broken Glass" — a time when members of the Nazi regime rounded up individuals of the Jewish faith and forced them to march through the streets as they watched their businesses, houses and synagogues be destroyed.
And as Rosenbach made that walk with thousands of other Jews, his Teddy bear was safely underneath his arm.
A couple years later, Rosenbach and his bear, along with Rosenbach's immediate family, were able to escape Nazi Germany, and they eventually settled in Kokomo.
However, Rosenbach's grandfather, and several other members of his family, were not as fortunate.
Rosenbach eventually named his stuffed companion "Max," after his grandfather, who he would never see again.
Rosenbach passed away in 2016, and Max was by his side until the very end.
There are so many stories like Rosenbach's, stories of men, women and children who faced persecution and death simply for their beliefs.
And for the next few weeks, the public is invited to read about and listen to those stories during a special exhibit on the second floor of the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library's Main Branch.
Called "Americans and the Holocaust," the traveling exhibit — open now through Aug. 17 during regular library hours — is on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and KHCPL is the only library in Indiana to host it.
According to Trisha Shively, KHCPL's head of adult and teen services and project coordinator for the "Americans and the Holocaust," bringing the exhibit to the library has been years in the making.
"Back in 2018, we applied to be one of 50 libraries in the U.S. to get it," she said. "We applied for a grant through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ... We were eventually awarded the grant, and they sent me to Washington, D.C., in January 2020 to be trained on the exhibit itself."
And then COVID struck, Shively noted, which pushed the date to receive the exhibit back from June 2021 to July 2023.
"This is a very humbling experience," she said. "Just the impact that this will have on our community, the ability to talk about it together as a community, it's important."
The exhibit, which has self-guided and KHCPL staff-guided tours, focuses on several key questions related to the Holocaust, Shively explained, mostly from the standpoint of the United States.
What did Americans know, and what more could have been done?
"The U.S., we didn't make great decisions at the time, but there were some good things that the citizens of the U.S. and the government did too," Shively noted. "And we aren't that removed from it. ... So I hope people come with an open mind, and I hope that they leave with a better understanding of answering those two key questions we're trying to address through this.
"I think that for a lot of people, it's hard for us," she added. "People say, 'Well why didn't we just go in and save them (Jews)?' But we didn't have satellite photos back then. We didn't have the internet. We couldn't send a picture to the internet and broadcast it live. So we probably didn't realize these things were happening, and we didn't see it firsthand until the first liberations (of the concentration camps) took place."
Along with over a dozen panels of information and a few video kiosks, there is also a survivors' series, where people will have an opportunity to hear firsthand accounts from men and women who survived the Holocaust or from their family members.
The library's Digital Den is also involved in the exhibit, providing visitors a virtual experience based off filmmaker Ken Burns' documentary "Defying the Nazis."
Amber Maze is a senior associate with the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, which helped provide KHCPL with several resources, including some of the exhibit's speakers.
"This is so timely," she told the Tribune, referring to the exhibit. "Unfortunately, we're seeing a rise in anti-Semitism and other forms of identity-based hatred. And so to have this opportunity for people to come and remember the past and also use the lessons that we should have learned back then to examine the present, is necessary."
Like Shively, Maze said she hopes visitors will come with an open mind, but she hopes they also leave with a call to action.
"I think there are a lot of preconceptions on the Holocaust and, in particular, America's role," Maze explained, "or what the United States did or did not do between 1933 and 1945. But I hope that people will come here and see this and then leave with a sort of renewed commitment to reaching a hand out to a neighbor, to somebody who's considered 'different' from them. And I hope they just have a willingness to pass on the torch of remembrance.
"We're losing more and more survivors every day," she added, "and so that responsibility now falls on us. Coming to this exhibit means you therefore become a witness and are therefore responsible for passing on the memory."
Maze stated that she also hopes the exhibit will officially help squelch the "Holocaust deniers," those individuals who believe the event never even took place at all.
"There's been a surge in recent years of Holocaust distortion and denial," Maze said. "And so having an exhibit like this hopefully is just another way that you can provide evidence to those people to say, 'Hey, this is real. It happened. This existed.' And it also serves as a reminder that something such as the Holocaust genocide does continue to happen. The same people that were targets of the Nazi regime can still be targeted again. And as a society, we can't allow that to happen."
