More than 500 artifacts and 400 photographs go on public display Saturday at the Cincinnati Museum Center. "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away." is billed as the largest collection of artifacts from Auschwitz outside of Europe.
It includes more than 500 original objects from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and more than 20 other international museums. Among them are shoes, eyeglasses, toys, clothing, and hundreds of other personal objects that belonged to survivors and victims.
The exhibit was created in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and curated by an international panel of experts, scholars, and historians. It details the rise of Nazi ideology through World War II and how that hatred played out horrifically in the Polish town of Oświęcim.
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is in Cincinnati for the exhibit opening. He says people shouldn't expect to find answers, but rather leave with questions.
"This is the most important thing that I think we could give to you, to your communities, to your city, to your region, to your state," says Piotr Cywiński, Ph.D. "Questions are extremely important, even if those questions are really, really not easy, and they will be not easy. As Elie Wiesel said, in every question, you can find a power that you will never see in the answers. I wish to all the visitors here to find some questions that will make them at least uncomfortable."
Cywiński adds that the exhibit can provide reflections for contemporary issues, too.
"We are living today in a very difficult world. It's no more a post-war era. We are living in a completely different world with so many new faces of de-humanizations, so many new racisms, anti-semitism, xenophobia. I think that we really need the remembrance, perhaps more, that it was 20 or 30 years ago. It's the last key that we have to perhaps understand and imagine our own role today in the world that we are living in."
Along with the touring exhibit, the museum is partnering with the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center to include stories from local survivors, many of whom traveled through Cincinnati's Union Terminal after the war to start new lives.
"The Holocaust and Humanity Center is the only Holocaust Museum in the United States with a positive, authentic connection to its space in that Holocaust survivors arrived by train here to Union Terminal to rebuild their lives in Cincinnati," says Jackie Congedo, CEO of the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center. "That connection between the space and the stories we tell makes this partnership and this exhibition especially powerful. When visitors walk through our permanent exhibition, they stand in the same building where journeys of survival became stories of renewal, and now with 'Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.', that history and its lessons are brought into even sharper focus."
The exhibit is 'like a mirror'
Steve Coppel's father, Werner, survived Auschwitz and the death march out of the concentration camp that's described in Elie Wiesel's book, Night. Coppel says his father, mother and older brother, at the time just a baby, arrived in Cincinnati in 1949, stepping off a train at Union Terminal carrying a single suitcase.
"That same suitcase, worn and simple, is now part of the exhibition, on display just steps from where he stood when he came to this city. Every time I see it, I am struck by what it represents. It's not just luggage. It's a symbol of survival, of resilience, and of everything my father carried that couldn't be packed — faith, courage, hope, and determination."
Like many, Werner Coppel wanted to move forward with his life in Cincinnati. His son recalls how he was called into action when a local newspaper ran a paid editorial denying the Holocaust. From that moment onward he felt compelled to share his story. Holocaust & Humanity Center CEO Congedo says that decision — and similar decisions by other local survivors — changed how the Cincinnati community thinks about history.
Coppel says his father chose to be an upstander rather than a bystander.
"He believed that the opposite of love is action," Coppel says. "This exhibition carries that same message. It asks each of us to reflect on what we can do, how we respond to hate, how we show courage, and how we stand up for one another. It reminds us that remembrance is not passive. It demands empathy, awareness, action, and I would add, guts.
"(It's) more than an exhibition. It's a mirror. It challenges each of us to take a look at who we are, what we stand for, and how we can help build a more compassionate world."
Some 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz during World War II. The vast majority were murdered within hours of deportation. In total, 1.1 million people died there, including 1 million Jews and tens of thousands of Poles, Sinti, Roma, Soviet POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses and people deemed "homosexuals," "criminals" or "inferior."
The camp was liberated by the Soviet Army on Jan. 27, 1945.
The exhibit opens Saturday and runs through April 12, 2026.
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