With the theme “Stories of Slave Labor and the Art of Freedom,” Northeastern’s 2016 Holocaust Awareness Week commemoration will center on an exhibit of letters from family and friends to a young Jewish girl who spent five years in German slave labor camps.
The “Letters to Sala” exhibit features letters, photographs and other documents that depict 16-year-old Sala Garncarz’s five-year odyssey in forced labor camps. An opening reception for the exhibit will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 27 at 4 p.m. in International Village lobby. Northeastern’s Jewish chaplain Elias Herb will lead a commemorative service. The exhibit, which opened at the New York Public Library but has not yet been seen in Boston, will be at Northeastern until the end of February.
Later that day, Ann Kirschner, Sala’s daughter and the author a book on her mother’s experiences, will moderate a panel discussion on transforming the original letters into first a book, then an exhibit, a play and a documentary. The panel discussion, featuring the exhibit curator, the playwright and the filmmaker, will begin at 6 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater. A staged reading of the Arlene Hutton’s play, “Letters to Sala” will be performed on Thursday, Jan. 28 at 4 p.m. at 909 Renaissance Park.
On Monday, Jan. 25, at 5 p.m., Northeastern will screen the documentary, “Silence of the Quandts,”a 60-minute film on BMW’s use of slave labor during the Nazi regime. Northeastern History Professor Timothy Brown will lead a discussion of the film, which will be screened in 90 Snell Library.
Newton resident Max Michelson will describe his experiences in Soviet- and German-occupied Latvia on Tuesday, Jan. 26 at noon in 909 Renaissance Park.
Northeastern’s Holocaust commemoration will take place on Monday, Jan. 25, at 8 a.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater. Gideon Klein scholar Madelyn Stone, a double major in history and journalism, will offer a multi-media presentation on the journalist, satirist and playwright, Jura Soyfer, who died in Buchenwald at the age of 26. Northeastern History Professor Jeffrey Burds will reconstruct the murder of over 3,000 Jews in Lwow, Ukraine on July 1, 1941, using photographs, films and eyewitness testimony.
For full details, visit the Holocaust Awareness Committee website.
