Touring Holocaust exhibit on display at Baylor library

A touring exhibit now on display at Baylor University's Jones Library aims to correct the assumption that Americans' awareness of the Holocaust started with the Allied liberation of death camps in the final months of World War II.

"Americans and the Holocaust," created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., documents through newspaper excerpts, film footage and photos that Americans knew in the 1930s of the growing and sinister persecution of German and European Jews by Nazi Germany.

That persecution would eventually progress from denial of civil liberties and businesses to detention in work camps and, ultimately, death camps that killed nearly 3 million Jews. More than 6 million European Jews were killed from the late 1930s to the end of World War II in a genocide that has been named the Holocaust. The Nazis also persecuted other groups, killing more than 5 million others including Polish and Roma people, Soviet prisoners of war, people accused of homosexuality, Jehovah's Witnesses and others.

Eric Ames, Baylor associate director for advancement, exhibits and community engagement, applied for an American Library Association grant three years ago to bring the exhibit to Baylor and, though successful, found roughly a two-year waiting period for an exhibit, with four exhibits touring the country at any one time.

Ames went to the Washington, D.C., museum for orientation and training on subjects such as exhibit security, how to handle questions from the community and what to do about protests.

Before the exhibit's arrival last month, Ames pulled photographs and information from Baylor's Texas Collection to add some period touches in a "The War at Home" display. 1945, for instance, saw the commissioning of the SS Baylor, a Victory class cargo ship that saw five months of use before the war's end.

"Americans and the Holocaust" also sets the scene in what was going on in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s that shaped America's response, or lack thereof, to the reports of Jewish persecution and later extermination under Nazi Germany.

Waves of anti-immigration and anti-intervention sentiment followed the end of World War I, compounded by economic depression in the 1930s. Antisemitism, fueled by the likes of Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-area Catholic priest and radio personality, and the rise of the American Nazi Party, contributed to a governmental reluctance to react to what was happening in Germany under the new Nazi government.

American newspapers and radio informed their audiences of the 1936 Berlin Olympics where German Jewish athletes were barred from competing and the wave of German anti-Jewish violence on Nov. 9-10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, where hundreds of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses were torched and destroyed.

The surge of Jewish emigration from Germany in light of such events, however, spurred no change in American immigration quotas despite a flood of visa requests. State Department official Breckinridge Long, in fact, actively worked to suppress refugee status for European Jews.

Even after the United States joined the fight against Axis forces in World War II, the thought of stopping the ongoing slaughter of Jews was not a major reason for American intervention.

While Hollywood films during the war years were often anti-Nazi in message and tone, they rarely addressed the ongoing detention and execution of European Jews, the exhibit notes.

"Americans and the Holocaust" also recognizes the individuals who took risks, sometimes including their lives, to rescue Jews.

Baylor officials and faculty members have added lectures and events to complement "Americans and the Holocaust" during its time here, including a School of Music concert Wednesday that featured Yiddish songs of the Holocaust.

Last week, Baylor history lecturer Steven Jug brought his class on The U.S. in Global Perspective to see the exhibit, one of several classes that have viewed it since its opening.

Baylor Libraries also will host a talk by Waco resident Nate Goldenberg, a second-generation Holocaust survivor, who will share his family's experience. His talk will take place at 7 p.m. May 12 at the Mayborn Museum and is open to the public.

Though Baylor students are several generations removed from the time period of the Holocaust, Ames said they find in the exhibit some resonance with current efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants, civilian deaths in Gaza and increasing antisemitism and racism.

"Unfortunately, there are a lot of parallels … in things happening today," he said.

Jones Library hours are 7:30 a.m.-midnight Monday-Thursday, 7:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday and closed Sunday. More information and recordings of previous Baylor events in support of the exhibit are available at library.web.baylor.edu/exhibits/holocaust.

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