Photos in French Children of the Holocaust “hit you like a ton of bricks” because they are the only remnants that tell the stories of the short lives of the children who were deported and murdered by the Nazis, said Rachel Seligman, director of Mandeville Gallery and curator of the exhibit being installed in the Nott this week.
“These are historical documents, not works of art,” she said.
“But they are made more powerful because they are real. There are family photos,
wallet photos, papers … all kinds of things that have been scraped together to
represent these young lives.”
The other exhibition, Of Light Amidst the Darkness – The Danish
Rescue, is powerful not just because of the strong subject matter, Seligman said.
Photographer Judith Ellis Glickman has used black and white silver prints, infrared
photography and negative prints to create a quality that is “appropriate and
evocative” of both the horror and hope of the Holocaust, she said. Her photographs
chronicle not only the Danish resistance and rescue, but the extermination camps as well.
Glickman's photos are installed in the Nott's second-floor Mandeville Gallery.
More than 40 local schools are sending students, and hundreds of others
are coming to campus for the exhibits.
“We hope that this is the beginning of a relationship that will
bring in local students and residents,” said Prof. Clifford Brown, chair of the Nott
Memorial Exhibition Committee. “We would like to have one or two exhibits per year
that will generate community interest of this magnitude.”