How To Spot One Of Us: A Collaborative Exhibition

“Yona” by Aliza Augustine

By Gabrielle Gale Prendatt-Carter

“How to Spot One of Us: A Collaborative Exhibition” currently located at the University’s Human Rights Institute Gallery, located in The Nancy Thompson Library, is a gallery featuring the works of Holocaust survivors’ children.

The gallery features the photography of Aliza Augustine, and film & poetry by Janet R. Kirchheimer.
Both second-generation Holocaust survivors, Augustine and Kirchheimer joined forces in the name of their families to provide this dual exhibit.

“So in these photos, you see some of their family members holding pictures of their ancestors and the pictures floating in the background are of their ancestors and family members, and the second generation survivors are the ones holding the pictures,” explained Human Rights Institute docent,
Chelsea Deline.

It was when Kirchheimer went to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. that she felt compelled to tell the story of her ancestors.

“She was in front of a cattle car and she just felt this heavy presence come over her, almost as if her ancestors didn’t want for her to be there. You just came to visit this exhibit but you’re not doing anything to continue telling our story,” explained Deline.

“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

During the Holocaust, cattle cars were used to transport captured Jews from the internment camps.

“They would pack like a hundred of them in the cattle cars so, some of them would die off in the cattle cars and it would be harder to breathe. There was no food and barely any oxygen or water,” said Deline.

The “How to Spot One of Us: A Collaborative Exhibition” was brought to Kean because of the Holocaust Museum located upstairs in the Human Rights Institute.

“We look for people who would like to come and exhibit here… any exhibit that comes here is telling some type of story,” said Deline.

“How to Spot One of Us” will be in the Human Rights Institute Gallery until May 18.

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