WINNIPEG — Winnipeg’s Jewish community is marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with three interrelated programs.
The centrepiece is a three-week exhibit (running till Feb. 13) titled The Face of the Ghetto: Pictures taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto 1940-1944. The exhibit opened with the North American premiere of the Polish documentary film Wielka Szpera (The Great Szpera) on Jan. 25, at the Berney Theatre and will end with a community lecture by Thomas Lutz, the exhibit’s curator and senior consultant with the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, on Feb. 11.
The program was put together by the Freeman Family Foundation Holocaust Education Centre of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and its chair, Belle Jarniewski. Two years ago, Jarniewski and the Holocaust education centre partnered with a major Winnipeg church – Westminster United – to mount an exhibition, Names Instead of Numbers, stories of former inmates – both Jewish and non-Jewish – of Dachau. For this current exhibit, Jarniewski arranged to partner with the Polish community. The exhibit will be shown at the Ogniwo Polish Museum Society in North Winnipeg and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Toronto is one of the sponsors (along with the province of Manitoba, the Ridd Institute for Religion and Global Policy, University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba faculty of arts).
The connection with the Ogniwo Polish Museum, she said, was Dan Stone, a past president of the Jewish Heritage Centre and retired U of W history professor whose specialty was Polish history. He did a presentation at the museum last year.
“Dan and I discussed the idea of the exhibit with the museum representatives,” Jarniewski said. “They were very excited about hosting it.”
The Face of the Ghetto – pictures taken in the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto 1940-1944 is a travelling exhibit, which was developed by Lutz and Ingo Loose for the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre – the exhibit’s home base – in June 2010. The nearly five-year-old centre is an outdoor and indoor museum built on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.
The exhibit features the work of a handful of Jewish photographers, commissioned by the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) “Jewish Council,” to take photographs of almost every aspect of ghetto life. Nearly 12,000 contact prints have survived and are currently held in the Lodz state archive. Fifty large-scale photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto – the name given to Lodz by the German occupiers in 1940 – are in the exhibition, making the little-known photo collection accessible to the public for the first time.
Jarniewski said the exhibit has been shown extensively in Europe, and within the last year been featured at Osgoode Hall in Toronto and, most recently, Dallas, Texas. The travelling exhibit includes statements from former ghetto residents and entries from the ghetto chronicle. A short overview of the ghetto’s history, a description of the photography as a historic source, and information about the photographers provide an introduction into the exhibition.
The film, Wielka Szpera (The Great Szpera), she noted, is a documentary about the week in September 1942, when the Nazis forced the Judenrat (Jewish administration) in the Lodz Ghetto to select 15,000 children, elderly and physically or mentally disabled ghetto residents for deportation to the death camps.
Szpera is German for curfew. “It was horrific having Jewish police help to round up their own people,” Jarniewski said .
Jarniewski met Thomas Lutz in December at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference in Manchester. (She was part of the Canadian delegation.)
“I found out that he gave lectures at Osgoode Hall and York University last year,” she said. “I asked if he would be willing to come to Winnipeg. We got the Ridd Institute at the University of Winnipeg to sponsor him. He will be speaking at both universities here in addition to his public lectures.”
All events are free.
