1992.31
Bohusovice Train Station at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia
Artist
Judy Ellis Glickman
(20th century - )
Title
Bohusovice Train Station at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia
Creation Date
1991
Century
20th century
Dimensions
12 5/8 in. x 18 7/8 in. (32.07 cm. x 47.94 cm.)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
gelatin silver print from infra-red negative
Credit Line
Gift of Judy Ellis Glickman
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
1992.31
Glickman Lauder, an American Jewish photographer, created these photographs about thirty years ago, when the Holocaust still defined American Jewish communities. At that time, many survivors were still alive, and while some did not speak of their pasts, others did. The Eichmann trial gave face to the testimonies of survivors for the first time in 1961. In 1964, survivors in Philadelphia commissioned what is considered the first public memorial to the Holocaust in the United States. Their efforts testify to the fact that it was survivors—not the general public—who spurred the need for public memorialization.
By the 1980s, with the passing of a generation of Holocaust survivors and as the country took a turn to the right, the risk of forgetting (or of downright suppression of historical fact) was very real and galvanized demands for formalized recognition of the Holocaust in the form of memorials and museums. There was a new urgency, in the Jewish community, to remember the past in a public way, an urgency that soon garnered national attention with the opening of the United States Holocaust Museum.
Natasha Goldman
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Art History, Bowdoin College
