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“Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” will be presented at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum next year
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will bring the internationally acclaimed exhibition “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” to Washington, D.C. for the first time, presenting original artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and over 20 collections from around the world that have rarely been seen in the United States. For the first time on its tour, the exhibition will be free to the public.
“Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” which was created by the Auschwitz Museum and the Spanish company Musealia, will be presented in Washington, D.C. from January 2027 through spring 2029, during the construction of the USHMM’s new permanent exhibition. A decade in the making, this major undertaking will ensure the history’s relevance to new generations and counter efforts to deny the truth of the Holocaust.
“Having our exhibition on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum marks the culmination of our excellent cooperation over the past several decades. We are grateful to our colleagues in Washington DC, under the excellent leadership of Sara Bloomfield. I am delighted that the exhibition “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away’ will help the Museum to continue fulfilling their important mission while their new exhibition is under construction,” said the director of the Auschwitz Memorial, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński.
The curators of “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” are international experts: Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, and Dr. Paul Salmons, who worked closely with historians and curators from the Auschwitz Museum Research Center headed by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz.
The exhibition depicts the successive stages of the development of Nazi ideology and describes the transformation of Oświęcim, an ordinary Polish town where Nazi Germany established the largest concentration camp and extermination center during the occupation, where approximately one million Jews and tens of thousands of people of other nationalities were murdered.
The victims of Auschwitz also included Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and other groups persecuted by Nazi ideology, such as people with disabilities, asocials, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. Furthermore, the exhibition includes objects portraying the world of the perpetrators - the SS men who created and managed this largest German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.
As Holocaust denial increases at alarming rates and the collective memory of the Holocaust grows more distant, a national study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found 63% of U.S. millennials and Gen Z did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” offers an urgently needed direct encounter with the authentic evidence of the crimes that took place at Auschwitz and the people who perpetrated those crimes.
“Each year there are fewer Holocaust survivors and World War II feels like the distant past to many Americans. We can’t bring our visitors to Auschwitz but through this exhibition, we are bringing a sense of Auschwitz to them in a very visceral way,” said United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Director, Sara J. Bloomfield.
For Musealia, the presentation at the USHMM represents far more than a new stop on the tour. “Auschwitz confronts us with pain, loss, and the deepest human rupture. But memory cannot rest on emotion alone. It must also help us understand how such crimes became possible, because only that understanding allows memory to remain responsible, just, and meaningful. To bring this exhibition to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is, for Musealia, both an extraordinary honour and a profound responsibility,” said Luis Ferreiro, Director and CEO of Musealia.
Visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will see several hundred items, mainly from the Auschwitz Memorial Collection. These include personal items belonging to the victims, such as suitcases, glasses and shoes. The exhibition will also include concrete posts forming part of the Auschwitz camp fence; fragments of the original barrack for prisoners in Auschwitz III-Monowitz; a desk and other items belonging to Rudolf Höss, the first and longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz; a gas mask used by the SS; and a lithograph depicting a prisoner's face by Pablo Picasso.
Additionally, the exhibition will feature individual objects on loan from more than 20 institutions, museums, and private collections worldwide, including Yad Vashem, the Wiener Library, and the Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Westerbork memorial sites.
More information about visiting “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” will be available in the coming months.
