By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Judy Feiman of Amberley Village looks at artifacts at the Mapping Our Tears exhibit. (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

Many Greater Cincinnati students may soon take a field trip unlike any other they have experienced - to the Holocaust, guided by the men and women who lived through it.

The Mapping Our Tears museum, which opens Sept. 4 at Hebrew Union College's Mayerson Hall, is different from any other exhibit documenting the Holocaust, organizers said.

There is no in-depth look at the rise of Nazism. There is no extensive documentation of how Adolf Hitler set out to wipe the Jewish people from the face of Europe. There are none of the heart-wrenching photographs of bodies piled for mass burial in hellish camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald; no pictures of starving prisoners or smoke rising from the death camp ovens.

Instead, there is a fourth-floor "attic," designed to resemble one from a typical 1930s home in Europe, the kind of place where thousands of Jews hid from persecution.

Visitors sit on crates or gather on the antique throw rug in the attic, facing three high-definition video monitors. There, they watch and listen as local Holocaust survivors - videotaped in the studios of WCET-TV (Channel 48) - tell their personal stories.

"They will teach by telling their stories,'' said Racelle Weiman, director of the college's Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, who conceived Mapping Our Tears three years ago and saw it through to completion. "Their lives are the lesson."

IF YOU GO

Organizers of Mapping Our Tears, the Hebrew Union College's "environmental theater'' on the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, hope the exhibit will be seen by thousands of Greater Cincinnati students. But, beginning Sept. 4, the exhibit will be open to the general public as well. Where: Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education in Mayerson Hall at Hebrew Union College, 3101 Clifton Ave., Clifton Heights. The display: A multi-media presentation, created to look like the attic of a Jewish European family of the 1930s. Designed by: Jack Rouse Associates, a Cincinnati firm. Schedule a visit: School groups with children ages 10 and over or any organized adult group can call (513) 221-1875, extension 355 or e-mail CHHE@huc.edu. Public hours: Noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The exhibit will be closed on Saturdays.

ON THE WEB

Web site of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education

As the narrators talk, a sophisticated lighting system spotlights various authentic period artifacts scattered throughout the attic - a bicycle ridden by a boy in the Dutch resistance movement, a trap door leading to a potato cellar where Jewish children hid, battered trunks and suitcases hauled across Europe by refugees fleeing the Nazis.

Teaching the world about the Holocaust is, by necessity, a story about death.

But for the Jews who survived the slaughter of millions of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles in the Nazi death camps scattered across eastern and central Europe 60 years ago, it is far more than that.

It is a story about life. A story about love and family, courage and perseverance.

The Clifton Heights museum will walk thousands of Cincinnati-area students through the stories of dozens of Holocaust survivors, refugees and death camp liberators through their ordeals under Nazi oppression to their coming to make new homes in the Cincinnati area.

"It is about people,'' said Weiman. "Who best to tell it but the people who lived it?"

Yaffa Eliach is a professor of Judaic history and literature at Brooklyn College who founded the first center for Holocaust studies in the United States. She got a look at the plans for Mapping Our Tears early on and was convinced that it would be "a way of looking at the Holocaust unlike any other."

"It does not dwell on death and destruction; it emphasizes hope and humanity, the courage of families, the will to survive," said Eliach, who created the "Tower of Life" photographic exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. "It is a magnificent statement."

In family photos, horror and hope

Mapping Our Tears tells the experiences of people like Judy Feiman of Amberley Village, Stephanie Marx of Wyoming, Carol Herman of Montgomery - three Jewish women whose lives were defined by the unspeakable horrors they and their families experienced.

All have contributed papers, pictures and documents that tell their families' stories of suffering and survival.

Feiman was born after World War II to a mother who survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Last week at the center, she showed a visitor a family photograph from before the war, from the day her mother and sister were married in a dual ceremony in their hometown in Romania.

Twenty-nine faces from Feiman's family are in the photograph - the laughing brides, the grooms in their top hats, smiling children and portly uncles in their three-piece suits.

"All but five of those people were killed by the Nazis,'' Feiman said, shaking her head.

Marx had pictures too - a photograph of her family in the days before the war and a photograph today, where the woman who escaped Europe and ended up in Cincinnati "one step ahead of the Nazis" is surrounded by her children and grandchildren.

"My family was lucky," Marx said. "My aunts and uncles, cousins - they were not. All dead.''

Herman, too, has a story to tell - a story of herself as a scared 15-year-old girl, chosen by her family to be the one who could escape Nazi Germany through Spain and make her way to America. Her mother, her father, her 8-year-old brother - all died.

"For years, you live with the guilt of the survivor," Herman said. "Why me? Why did I not die? But what you must do is turn it into something positive. Tell your story and make sure that the world does not forget."

A unique strategy to teach history

The three Cincinnati women, and dozens of their fellow survivors and refugees, are doing that by telling their stories through the Mapping Our Tears exhibit.

Among the museum artifacts, the only sign of the Nazi regime is a swastika flag that hangs outside a window with broken glass that will be lit when a Jewish survivor tells of his bar mitzvah day when, as his family celebrated, he could hear Nazi soldiers in the street below his home, singing a martial song about the day "when Jewish blood runs down our swords."

"The flag, we kept on the outside," Weiman said. "There is nothing of the Nazis in here. This is our attic. This is our home. They are on the outside."

Weiman said she was inspired to create Mapping Our Tears after a visit 10 years ago to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

After walking through the museum and seeing the exhibits of photos from the death camps and the artifacts of the Nazi regime, she stood outside and asked people on the way out a question - what impressed them most in the museum?

"Every one of them, young and old, said it was the videos of the personal testimony of the survivors," Weiman said.

When the opportunity to create Mapping Our Tears came along, she said, "I wanted the survivors to be up front, not in the back."

Mapping Our Tears, Weiman said, "is not about death. It is about life."

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com