Sparked by antisemitic incidents that occurred at Berkshire County schools and in schools around the nation, Light in the Darkness will examine the long history of antisemitism around the world, including events that led to the Holocaust, words of children from the Holocaust, stories of heroism and hope, and video interviews with Berkshire County Holocaust survivors and their children. A special focus will be on original artworks created by the children of the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia.
SPECIAL EXHIBITION SET TO OPEN SPRING 2027
Numerous artifacts will be on display, including vintage photographs and posters, films that were created to inspire antisemitism, personal items prisoners had at concentration camps, and objects on loan from the Darrell English Collection and others.
Also featured will be a selection of artworks from the Jewish Museum in Prague’s collection, created by both professional artists and children incarcerated in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Despite its sinister role in the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” this transit concentration camp, located about 30 miles northwest of the Czech capital, became synonymous with a peculiar artistic colony where art and education served as powerful means of defiance against the Nazi genocidal regime and as an effective, albeit short-term, survival strategy. The drawings by adult and child inmates—most of whom were eventually murdered in extermination camps in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe—stand not only as powerful testimonies to the tragic fates of their creators but also as some of the most haunting reminders of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust).
Lead support for the exhibit has been spearheaded by a $20,000 gift from the Matthew and Hannah Keator Family Foundation.
IMAGES:
Top: Page from the booklet published for the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. Expressionist, surrealist, and Dada artworks were shown alongside artworks made by those with physical and mental disabilities to illustrate the negative effect of Jewish Bolshevism on contemporary German culture.
Middle: “Prisoners from an evacuation train from Bergen-Belsen pose next to a railroad car in Magdeburg: April 13-16, 1945”, Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 97646.
Bottom: Eva Tochová (Czech, 1933-1944), Memories of Life Before Deportation, 1944, OBJECT.JMP.COLL/129713, © Jewish Museum in Prague
