Daniel Libeskind has collaborated with photographer Caryl Englander and curator Henri Lustiger Thaler from the Amud Aish Memorial Museum to present a temporary exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “Through the Lens of Faith” opens on July 1st, 2019, marking the 75th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation in 1945.
The exhibition consists of 21 color portraits taken by Caryl Englander of Jewish, Polish, and Sinti survivors of the camp, with the photographs taken over the course of three years. Englander sought to capture the subject intimately, with many looking directly into the lens with sleeves rolled up to display the camp’s infamous serial numbers.
Three-meter-tall vertical steel panels are lined up on both sides of a path branching from the route leading to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. The panels’ repetitive pattern is reminiscent of the stripes from the prisoners’ uniforms, while the exterior mirrored surface reflects the surrounding landscape and evokes physical and spiritual freedom. Visitors encounter the portraits upon entering the exhibition, each framed in a recessed vertical panel and overlaid with black glass etched with the words of the person’s experiential account of the camp.
We can’t understand the millions that were murdered in the Holocaust, but we can understand one person’s story. This exhibition brings the stories of the survivors into focus while weaving their intimate accounts into the context of the camp and contemporary life.
-Daniel Libeskind
The exhibition will be open from July 1st, 2019 to October 31st, 2020.
