Camille Kelly | Reporter
The “Americans and the Holocaust” traveling exhibition will be on display from April 11 to May 20 at the Jesse H. Jones Library, making Baylor one of only two Texas locations to host the exhibit. The 1,100-square-foot exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the American Library Association (ALA) tells the story of the Holocaust through the lens of America’s awareness during the time.
A large part of the exhibit explores how college students heard about the Holocaust as it was happening, said Eric Ames, Baylor associate director for advancement, exhibits and community engagement.
“I hope that students can see that as major world events are happening during your lifetime, you can experience that in a lot of different ways,” Ames said. “We think about today’s society: news happens, and it immediately shows up on our phones or in our social feeds or wherever we see it. It was a very different world in the 1930s and ’40s, but college students were still experiencing these major world events while they were students at Baylor.”
Jones Library is the only university library hosting this cycle of the exhibition, a time slot the library applied for over three years ago. This exhibition will be free and open to students and the public.
“It’s a competitive process,” Ames said. “There was a year of training and lots of details to work out, but we were just fortunate to be chosen amongst all the other places that applied for this year’s opportunity to exhibit.”
Ames has been working with Laura Semrau, humanities librarian, to compile the grant application and make all the preparations for the exhibit’s arrival on Baylor’s campus.
“It is important for university communities such as Baylor to pause and consider important events of the past, such as the Holocaust,” Semrau said. “I hope the exhibit will help us learn to reflect on history and think about how we respond to today’s world events as well.”
This event is a great opportunity for faculty and students to experience the exhibit, according to Ames. He also hopes that the greater Waco area takes advantage of this opportunity to see the exhibition and attend the accompanying events.
“It’s exhaustively researched and was put together by academics and professional historians,” Ames said. “It’s an opportunity for people to come in and experience several of these programs.”
Throughout the next two months, there will be a variety of free panels and presentations tied to the exhibition, including a faculty panel, a student panel featuring Aledo graduate student Lauren Lykins, a presentation from Dr. Lauren Bairnsfather, CEO of the Anne Frank Center USA, and stories shared by Waco resident Nate Goldenberg from his family’s history of surviving the Holocaust.
Dr. Uri Schreter from Queen’s University Canada, a world‑renowned specialist in Yiddish music, will present Yiddish songs of the Holocaust with Baylor faculty in a free concert at 7:30 p.m. on April 29 at Roxy Grove Hall.
“We’re working with partners all across campus, and we are trying to look at this exhibit through as many different entry points as we can,” Ames said. “One of the speakers who’s coming from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. is a scholar whose focus of her work was on the way young people in college experience the Holocaust.”
According to Ames, the speaker, Dr. Rebecca Erbelding, will be able to dig into all of the online archives that Baylor has scanned and digitized over the years in her presentation at 7 p.m. on April 16.
“She can look back and see exactly what Baylor Lariat reporter said in 1942, or ‘Here’s a news article that ran in the Lariat in 1944,’ and use the actual words from Baylor students at the time to tell the story of how college students experience that as a part of the bigger war in Europe,” Ames said.
More information about the exhibition and schedule of speakers, programs and events is available on the University Libraries website.
