Holocaust Exhibit in Washington

Gail Rigler, a member of the Board of Directors of the Second Generation of Holocaust Survivors, was helping to set up an exhibit on the Holocaust in the Rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building Tuesday when she was approached by a woman.

“Why are you all doing this exhibit?” Rigler quoted the woman as saying. “We all know the Holocaust never happened.”

“And that’s exactly the reason why we are all here today,” Rigler said at a ceremony–marking the opening of the exhibit which runs through Friday, “to explain not only that it did happen but that it needs to get remembered.”

The need to remember was also stressed by the other participants in the ceremony, Carol Lister, New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and Rep. Charles Schumer (D. NY), who sponsored the exhibit.

FIRST HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT AT THE CAPITOL

“If the Holocaust is remembered, if the Holocaust is never forgotten, it will not happen again,” Schumer said. He noted that this was the first time a Holocaust exhibit had been displayed at the Capitol and it opened just one week before Yom Hashoah is observed on May 6.

The exhibit includes posters depicting pictures and other documents from the entire Nazi period, 1933-1945 provided by the ADL.

It also includes pictures taken by American soldiers who liberated the camps at Dachau, Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf and Mauthausen, which are part of the archives of the Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn, N.Y. Tuesday was the 41st anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by American forces.

Rigler, who represented the Center, said the pictures were taken by “individual soldiers who felt the need to document what they had seen, to prove that the atrocities indeed did take place.” Schumer said that it is hoped that long after the exhibit, its memory “stays with members of Congress” as well as visitors to the Cannon Building.