Third Text
After Gaza, Reflecting on ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’ in Boston
Erik DeLuca gives a personal response to this touring exhibition that was in Boston (15 March – 15 September 2024)
22 August 2025
Billboard for ‘Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away’, Boston, 2024, photo by the author
I’m staring at a pair of ‘Prisoners’ clogs’ in a glass box. Manoeuvring my way between the packs of people, nudging shoulders, I continue: ‘Lipstick, powder case’, and ‘storage box for chess pieces made out of a sardine tin’. I am at the travelling exhibition, ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’, which I learned about from an aggressive advertising campaign: ‘Now Open’ in Boston with ‘700 artifacts from over 20 international museums and institutions to serve as a universal warning against intolerance…’. With train tracks leading into the entrance of Auschwitz, one such advertisement ended by calling out: ‘Humanity needs you to see this. Plan your visit today. Will sell out! An Exhibition To Shake The Conscience Of The World.’
When I walked into the exhibition, I was greeted with a popular quote on the wall from the Shoah survivor, chemist and writer Primo Levi: ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again.’ What the curators refrained from explaining was Levi’s position as outspoken against people, institutions and states who exploit the memory of the Shoah. [1] Perhaps to a fault – as this reflection suggests – the curators of the exhibition left much unexplained.
Screenshot of a Facebook post and comments about ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’
Produced by the Spanish for-profit corporation Musealia, the exhibition belongs to an international oeuvre including ‘Titanic’ and ‘The Berlin Wall. A World Divided’. According to Musealia’s website, since its 2017 opening in Madrid, the latest iteration of ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’, which has been in Boston over 2024 (15 March – 15 September, in The Castle at Park Plaza), ‘set an unprecedented record by selling out its first two weekends in the city’. Underneath the polyphony of buzzing audio guides, I came to a glass box of worn baggage. I am reminded of being at the Kaiserslautern Hauptbahnhof train station, where I imagined the contents of my Jewish family's baggage as they boarded the train to Gurs, a concentration camp in Vichy France. What also struck me was how this scene called to mind the current situation in Gaza. The bags in the glass box look similar to the ones displaced Palestinians carry as they zigzag to non-existent ‘safe zones’ through mud and rubble as the world watches.
It is impossible not to think of Gaza now when I pass ‘Cauldron and big wooden spoon’. These food utensils from Auschwitz become reanimated with knowledge of the present-day famine: the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) levels of starvation [2] have signalled a wave of aid into Gaza that Israel is actively refusing with force, as witnessed with the ‘flour massacre’, [3] and the massacre of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. [4] The use of food as a weapon is not a new tactic. In 2006, Dov Weissglas – a lawyer and senior advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – was infamously quoted as saying: ‘We have to make them [Gazans] much thinner, but not enough to die.’ [5] The exhibition attendant signals me to move to the next room where I see a whip, a concrete post and a wooden toy truck.
In one of the social media comments under the exhibition advertisement that lured me here, someone had written ‘Watch the Zone of Interest’, Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film based on the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, whose desk has been transported to Boston for inclusion in the exhibition. The Zone of Interest shows the Höss family’s domesticity juxtaposed with translucent orangish hues billowing from smokestacks and sharp screams from the other side of the concrete wall. Höss’s wife picks flowers while children play in the garden, a few feet away from the Auschwitz crematorium. Glazer created a moment that billows in the atmosphere today: how people choose to make evil ordinary – not long ago, not far away, and now. [6] During his speech at the Oscars after the film won Best International Feature earlier in 2024, Glazer provided further context: ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.’ [7] Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum (who also co-produced ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’) reflected on Glazer’s Oscar speech in a post on X: ‘The Zone of Interest is not a film about the Shoah. It is primarily a profound warning about humanity and its nature.’ [8]
Screenshot of a Facebook post and comments about ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’
I am pushed by the flow of the crowd into another room with a ‘Blanket’ and a ‘Handmade Doll’. On the wall is a graphic flowchart of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws – the bedrock of the Shoah. If you had three or more Jewish grandparents, you were deemed not to have German blood and were therefore ineligible to be a citizen. These laws made marriages and relationships between Jews and Germans illegal and were later amended to also criminalise Black people, men presumed to be gay, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities, and Roma.
When I saw The Zone of Interest, it was fittingly paired with a trailer for Ava DuVernay’s film Origin (2023), based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, published in 2020. Speaking about the overlap between African Americans in the US, Dalits in India and Jews in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson shows how caste is the ‘same system with different outcomes’ of social stratification that sets the supremacy of one group against the inferiority of another based on ancestry. In fact, the curators of ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’ chose to omit how the legal framework of the Nuremberg Laws were modelled after official Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws in the US. As Wilkerson outlines, while unique and industrial in scale, the Shoah is not without precedent and exists within a colonial and imperial context. Historian Michael Rothberg might describe Wilkerson’s method as multidirectional, emphasising the importance of acknowledging the particularities of the Shoah while cautioning against using it as a universal benchmark for measuring all atrocities. [9] In doing so, intertwining the Shoah with other histories of collective violence deflects a zero-sum, exclusionist framework for crafting collective memory. When Cywinski, the producer of ‘Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,’ notes that the exhibition urges guests to prevent ‘all ideologies of hatred’, [10] how much multidirectional context is necessary to ensure inclusivity?
The International Court of Justice has found it ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing acts of genocide, [11] and the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for ‘Israel has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival’. [12] At the time of writing, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, roughly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel (though a study in The Lancet shows that the death toll in Gaza could exceed 186,000). [13] Since October 2023, two million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, and the majority of their infrastructure – wastewater treatment plants, sewage pumps, hospitals, school buildings, higher education institutions, mosques, churches, homes, buildings and cultural sites – has been destroyed. [14]
I am gestured to move along by the exhibition attendant to adhere to my timed-entry ticket; I pass by ‘Bunk from a prisoner barrack’ and ‘Child’s shoe with sock’. On the wall in the next room, I notice a tiny piece of paper with stamps on it, ‘British visa for Palestine in a German passport’. On the adjacent wall, it was jarring to see the following, with minimal context: ‘German Jews scrambled to find refuge abroad, yet there were few opportunities – especially after Britain effectively closed Palestine in response to Arab riots.’ Jews had very few options for asylum. Yet it is important to clarify for the audience of this exhibition that Palestine was never ‘open’ and the ‘Arabs’ weren’t rioting, they were rising up against a colonial power that was facilitating the theft of their land. A distorted mirror image emerges.
One of the individuals scrambling to find refuge was my grandmother. Facilitated by what I believe was the controversial Haavara (Transfer) Agreement, a collaboration between Nazi Germany, Zionist German Jews and the British Mandate, she purchased a ticket in October 1935 to Jaffa Port, Palestine. She stepped off the steamship Patria as a refugee – without citizenship, with both parents in a Jewish ghetto, and her sisters lost – and onto colonised Palestinian land. She was forced into being a refugee and a settler at once.
The exhibition chose to synthesise two distinct issues: the Shoah, and the Zionist project to create a Jewish homeland. It did this by painting the establishment of Israel on the land of Palestine, after expelling its inhabitants (‘rioting Arabs’), as the most logical option to save the survivors of the Shoah. Big and bold on one of the walls, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann claims: ‘There are now two sorts of countries in the world, those that want to expel the Jews and those that don’t want to admit them.’ I turn around to a map of Zionist development: ‘Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel).’
The expression ‘from Holocaust to rebirth’ is a slogan of Zionist consciousness. For this, I feel compelled to make a point that the exhibition decided to omit: from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s, most of the 500,000 people who immigrated to Israel were Holocaust survivors. These survivors comprised the majority of the militant Zionist forces that expelled Palestinians from their land. In parallel, a new international moral imperative prevented the near-bankrupt state of Israel from failing. For example, in 1952, atoning for their crimes against humanity, the Federal Republic of Germany sent Israel an unprecedented reparations package, consisting of money, services and infrastructure valued at roughly 800 million US dollars. These are just a few of the details that are part of extensive research – such as Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (2000) and The Holocaust and the Nakba (edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, 2018) – that illustrates how the Shoah was both crucial in the creation of Israel and subsequently an event that led to the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – a practice that continues today. When Israel’s United Nations ambassador, Gilad Erdan, wore a yellow star on his suit jacket at a 2024 delegation, he continued the culture of weaponising the Shoah: ‘Just like my grandparents, and the grandparents of millions of Jews, from now on, my team and I will wear yellow stars. We will wear this star until you wake up and condemn the atrocities of Hamas.’
Screenshot of a Facebook post and comments about ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’
I turn the corner and come to a shiny, undergarment slip that an Auschwitz inmate smuggled in to wear under her rough prisoner uniform. It is from the collection of the Yad Vashem ‘World Holocaust Remembrance Center’ in Jerusalem. I recall seeing this very slip when I visited the centre as a teenager on a Birthright trip, and I remember being in a similar overwhelmed state of disbelief, that six million Jewish people were killed in one of humanity’s greatest disasters. I have since come to know that Yad Vashem’s site for remembering the Shoah overlooks a depopulated, destroyed and ethnically cleansed Palestinian village, the site of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre. [15] Now belonging to the Nakba [16] – the Shoah resonating out, continuing its erasure of the Palestinians, manifested in occupation: military rule, illegal settlements, administrative detentions, settler-only apartheid roads, separation walls, checkpoints and outright killings, recognised as unlawful by the International Court of Justice. [17]
While on a solidarity delegation in Palestine, a friend shared with me a noteworthy soundscape of commemoration. On both Holocaust Remembrance Day and Independence Day in Israel, air raid sirens sound throughout the country, followed by a moment of silence. For Israelis these are necessary moments of sonic remembrance. For Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, this is noise, a de facto memorial of their catastrophe that presents the questions which are absent in ‘Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away’. Why were the Palestinians made to pay the price for a heinous crime committed by European Nazis, in which they had no part? Does the remembrance of one history need to erase others from view?
My visit to the exhibition concluded with a powerful statement on the wall by survivor Charlotte Delbo: she implores, ‘You who are passing by, I beg you, do something.’
[1] See Pankaj Mishra, ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, London Review of Books, vol 46, no 6, 21 March 2024, accessed 24 March 2024
[2] See ‘Gaza Strip: IPC Acute Food Insecurity Special Snapshot (1 May – 30 September 2024)’, United Nations, 25 June 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[3] See ‘UN experts condemn ‘flour massacre’, urge Israel to end campaign of starvation in Gaza’, United Nations press release, 5 March 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[4] See ‘7 WCK team members killed in Gaza’, World Central Kitchen, 2 April 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[5] See ‘Putting Palestinians “On a Diet”: Israel’s Seige & Blockade of Gaza, Institute for Middle East Understanding, 14 August 2014
[6] See Hannah Arendt, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem–1: Adolph Eichmann and the banality of evil’, The New Yorker, 8 February 1963, accessed 1 July 2024
[7] See ‘Jonathan Glazer calls for end to 'dehumanising' of victims in Gaza and Israel – video’, The Guardian, 11 March 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[8] See ‘Post: Auschwitz Memorial’ on X, 14 March 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[9] See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, Redwood City, California, 2009
[10] See Arielle Gray, ‘A new Holocaust exhibit in Boston confronts a painful history’, WBUR, 15 March 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[11] See Fatima Al-Kassab, ‘A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is 'plausible' but does not order cease-fire’, NPR, 26 January 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[12] See Josef Federman, ‘War crimes prosecutor seeks arrest of Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Netanyahu’, AP News, 20 May 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[13] See Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, ‘Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential’, The Lancet, 5 July 2024, accessed 1 July 2024
[14] See ‘Fact Sheet: 288 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: By the Numbers’, Institute for Middle East Understanding, 22 July 2024, accessed 1 August 2024
[15] See ‘Explainer: The Deir Yassin Massacre’, Institute for Middle East Understanding, 5 April 2023, accessed 1 July 2024
[16] See ‘Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), Institute for Middle East Understanding, 5 April 2023, accessed 1 July 2024
[17] See ‘Experts hail ICJ declaration on illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as “historic” for Palestinians and international law’, United Nations press release, 30 July 2024, accessed 1 August 2024
Erik DeLuca is a site-responsive interdisciplinary artist focused on collective remembrance. His projects have been featured at the Braunschweig University of Art, Kling & Bang, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Fieldwork: Marfa, and Montez Press Radio. His writing has been published in Public Art Dialogue, Mousse, The Wire and Boston Art Review. He earned a PhD from the University of Virginia, was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and worked in Myanmar as an Asian Cultural Council Fellow. He has taught at Iceland University of the Arts, Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Erik participates in solidarity delegations and collaborations in Palestine and is an Associate Professor of Art Education and Contemporary Art Practice at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.