Marking Holocaust Remembrance Day—Yom HaShoah—at The New York Public Library, this display draws from the holdings of the Dorot Jewish Division, the Rare Book Division, and the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. In 2014, Yom HaShoah falls on April 28.
This display follows an arc. It begins on the very eve of the war, with an outwardly unremarkable artifact—the 1939 telephone directory from Warsaw, Poland. It then moves through the Holocaust itself, touching on the destruction of an entire community (a photograph of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto), as well as stories of individual survival (a postcard preserved by a young woman imprisoned in a Nazi forced-labor camp). Holocaust Remembrance concludes with documents of resistance, liberation, and post-war survival, including a 1946 edition of the rousing “Song of the Jewish Partisans.” The display is accompanied by a video presentation of original photographs documenting Jewish life in Poland and particularly the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942–44.
