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The public got its first opportunity to explore the Americans and the Holocaust Exhibition on Saturday at the Warsaw Community Public Library, 310 E. Main St., Warsaw.
Dana McAfee, an event programmer at the WCPL who was providing tours of the exhibit, explained, “Basically, it deals with several questions, things like: What did Americans know about the Holocaust? How did they feel about refugees? How did they handle the refugee situation? Why did they go to war? What was the purpose? And then how did they respond to what happened over there?”
She said it was very interesting to her the reasoning why so many Americans just didn’t know what was really happening.
“I think they got blamed a little bit for being callous, but they just really was cautious,” McAfee said.
The exhibit comes from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (https://www.ushmm.org/) in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the American Library Association (https://www.ala.org/).
She said WCPL is one of 50 libraries in the country in the past two years to get the opportunity to host the exhibit. It’s the only one in Indiana this year. The exhibit will be in Warsaw through July 23 before moving on to the next place. It’s open during regular library hours.
“So we are very excited to have it open and share it with you today,” she told the first tour group. “We also hope you will participate in some of the programs that we have.”
Program and family guides are available at the start of the exhibit.
From working on the exhibit, McAfee said she learned how very important it is to know.
“This information is so important to know. Hopefully, to not repeat it. To give a little more of a clear understanding of, again, the way America perceived what was going on back then. To create a little bit of empathy and compassion for - not that most people don’t already have that - but when you’re working with it and putting it together and researching it, it really hits you,” she said.
James Jarrette was one of the first people to take the tour of the exhibit Saturday.
“I’m an old history major, so I think it’s a very important exhibit on a very important time of our lives. Of course, I wasn’t born then, but in the lives of our country,” he said.
Jarrette said the exhibit reminds him of stuff he’s studied before.
“It’s a good compilation of that period, a very ugly period in human history. It’s pretty shameful,” he stated.
Miriel McFarland said she took the tour and checked out the exhibit Saturday because “I think it’s a really important aspect that we don’t consider very often - the American perspective and how much we chose to overlook. And that happens still today. What types of things are going on throughout the world, and the world has become smaller. We have so many international relations that we need to be aware of, what else is out there and how we can be helpful and not so hypocritical.”
She brought her daughter with her to the exhibit because “this is just as important to her as it is to adults because it’s important to learn from a very young age what people are capable of doing, whether that be positive or negative, and how to help the issue eventually, and learning that from a young age is imperative.”
One thing McFarland found interesting in the exhibit was about the immigration quotas. They were hard numbers, and the U.S. wasn’t even fulfilling those hard numbers. “There wasn’t really a good explanation as to why, because no one can justify racism and the State Department couldn’t justify the racism so they chose to ignore it,” she stated.
Jim Barber said he attended the exhibit and tour because it was something he was interested in.
“I’m a history buff, so I love history. That’s a big part of it,” he said, noting that much of it was a reminder of what he’s learned in the past. “I’ve written some (historical fiction) books, and one of the books was kind of a World War II basis, so I knew a lot of this already.”
Barber said the exhibit is an awareness.
“I guess you don’t want to think of it as a stain on America because you can kind of understand trying to protect ourselves, but at the same time I think it’s not a whole lot different than today. You’re getting viewpoints and hearing stories, and is it real? Is it fake? Is it fake news? Is it real news? And I think the same thing was going on back then. Nothing is really happening, or, it’s not that bad, or it’s worse. Just being able to sort out all the facts from the interference,” he said.
It’s worse today because of all the social media, while back then it took longer to get all the information.
If a person takes their time to read, look at and watch all the videos on the kiosks, McAfee said they could probably get through the whole exhibit in about 20 minutes.
“They’re not going to get quite the depth that the tour is, but they’re going to get everything they need. So, everything they would need to know, they would get it by looking at it themselves. The tour just goes a little bit more,” she said.
The next led tours, like those provided Saturday by McAfee, are scheduled for 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Thursday, June 25; 6 to 7:30 p.m. Monday, July 6; 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, July 11; 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Thursday, July 16; according to the WCPL’s website at https://warsaw.librarycalendar.com/events/upcoming
The website also lists the dates and times for other activities related to the Holocaust exhibit.
One of those events is Holocaust survivor Dr. Irene Miller will speak from 6 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 23 at the Warsaw Performing Arts Center. The free program was made possible, in part, with support from the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation and the Warsaw Performing Arts Center, 1 Tiger Lane, Warsaw.
In a final note about the exhibit at the library, McAfee said, “We do have a really beautiful place at the end of the exhibit we’re calling the Reflection Area and we have a Reflection Tree. And people can have a card and they can either put the name of a loved one or a date or something they gathered from watching this and put it in a box, and then we’re going to put all the tags on the tree, and we’re calling it a Remembrance Tree. So, when you’re going through it, just keep in mind if there’s something you’d like to share that you learned from it or gained from it or somebody you know was directly involved in it. You can remember that.”
