Ten years ago, 19-year-old Jordana Lebowitz found a movie prop in Toronto. Now, her traveling exhibit dedicated to Holocaust remembrance is making a stop on campus. The traveling exhibit was constructed within a movie set’s train car, a replica of the cattle-cars that were used to transport victims of the Holocaust to concentration camps. The car was parked on campus from April 21 to 23, accompanied by a private collection of Holocaust artifacts that travels with the car.
Lebowitz was an underclassmen at the University of Guelph when she had the initial idea to bring a cattle car exhibit to her campus for education week, driven by a desire to get people more connected to history. After persistently searching for a car she could use, and finally finding one from the set of a zombie movie, she and some classmates began creating the exhibit.
Lebowitz said, “In the beginning, we used printed pictures, historical images, and we created a makeshift kind of exhibit inside.” She also collaborated with minority affinity groups to gather information about the ways they were targeted.
Though Lebowitz got permission from the school to bring the car to campus for two days, she had to spend the night outside, watching over the car. Within a few years, the exhibit was so successful that she was able to take it across the country.
Money was the main obstacle, but Lebowitz said that people were willing to make calls for her, recommend contacts experienced with business and help her raise money. She said, “When people see young people passionate about something and dedicated to something, they really want to help them, and that’s what happened. I had this idea, and I spoke to some teachers and professors and friends on campus, and they all just really wanted to help me make it happen.”
Far removed from printer paper stapled to walls, the car now features video and photo projections on three of the walls, and a robust collection of historical material.
According to Lebowitz, the exhibit spends 10 minutes focusing on the history of the Holocaust, and another 10 minutes are dedicated to stories from survivors themselves. One of those survivors is Hedy Brohm, who was just a teenager when she was taken to Auschwitz, where her mother was killed. Lebowitz met Brohm on an education trip to Poland in 2008, where she visited some Holocaust museums and concentration camps. The car is accompanied by a Holocaust artifacts, as well, from a private collection.
Lebowitz said that while she constantly sought advice from experts, and was mentored by Michael Birnbaum, a renowned Holocaust historian, she still faced some criticism for her exhibit. Specifically, for her use of technology and interactive elements. She said, “What I learned is that there’s kind of these two camps in Holocaust education in general. Well, one camp really believes in innovating. There is another camp that I have encountered, but I don’t belong to, and they’re the ones who have given me pushback.” This second camp that Lebowitz refers to has argued that children shouldn’t be entering cars at all, or that projections shouldn’t be used.
She said, “It was very debilitating, very depressing. When you’re a young person, and you’re trying to do something that you think is good, you want people to accept you and your ideas and support you, and when you feel that rejection or judgment, it can be very hard to continue going on.” She continued, “I went back to the survivors and I said, ‘I met these people and they don’t like what I’m doing, and they think it’s wrong.’ And the survivors said, ‘No, this is what we want.’ And I had to make a decision, who is the most important? Who is my priority? It’s the survivors.”
Elizabeth Fletcher, a senior who visited the car with her Oceanography class, appreciates the use of projectors. “This exhibit was a very interesting way of learning about the Holocaust. Not many people get this experience.”
Though Lebowitz is confident in her approach, she does make the distinction between experiential education, like entering a cattle car, and immersive education involving simulations. She draws this line for a few reasons. First, simulations may be too traumatizing for younger kids. She explained, “It kind of has the opposite effect of what you want, which is you want the students to leave wanting to learn more and care about this, rather than being traumatized having nightmares.” Additionally, she said, “you want the tech to enhance, not distract.” But the primary reason, according to Lebowitz, is that simulation simply isn’t accurate.
English teacher Miriam Emery and history teacher Matt Ives gave some students the opportunity to meet with Lebowitz on zoom, for their wintermission, “The Past is Alive! Public History, Memorials and Commemoration.” Emery had heard about the exhibit due to the initial plan for it to come the previous school year. “[Ives] and I decided, well, we could do this. And we sort of built our entire winter mission around, around these last two hours on Friday.”
As for future plans, Lebowitz hopes that eventually a second exhibit will be able to travel concurrently with the first. Two more survivors have already been filmed sharing their experience. Lebowitz said, “I hope that every person relates to it in their own way. I want the people who go into the cattle car and see this education to feel connected and care about the stories of the survivors and the history, and then I want them to think about what this means to them today.”
