An immersive multimedia Holocaust exhibit — The Cattle Car: Stepping In and Out of Darkness — was available at City Hall for the public to experience over this last weekend and for Newton high-school students to experience on Monday and Tuesday. It consists of a replica of a cattle car that would transport 100 Jews and other targeted groups to the concentration camps and extermination camps of the Holocaust.
Inside the cattle car, visitors experience an immersive, 20-minute video projected on all four walls. (Although such cattle cars held 100 or more people, groups of visitors are limited to 25 people.) Footprints painted on the floor suggest dramatically the range of ages and the crowding in the car.
Outside the cattle car, an exhibit of Holocaust artifacts from the Darrel English collection is on display, and the project’s education team answers questions and leads discussions. (See a 3-minute video about the exhibit.)
Reactions from two Newton North High School sophomores who experienced the exhibit:
- Kal Dickerman:“It was great to hear first-hand accounts from people who were actually there. Hearing these stories helps inspire me to create change in my life because the struggles they faced are so much more difficult then things in my life.”
- Alex Hoffman: “Through the personal stories in the video while being inside the exhibit, I got to get a glimpse of what they had actually gone through in person. I have never been to a concentration camp, so I have never seen what it was like in person, but being in the exhibit and understanding that there would have been a hundred people crowded in that little space for three days, and they would have been just starving, sick, and dying was all around terrible.”
The exhibit will be available at Brookline High School on May 11 and Swampscott High School on May 17 — open to the public 6PM-8PM on each day. Each showing is 30 minutes long, for up to 25 people at a time, with the last showing at 7:30PM. Reservations are required, using the links above.
The project was initiated in 2015 by a university student, Jordana Lebowitz. This is the first full school year for the exhibit to be on tour. Since September, ShadowLight Productions has taken the exhibit to seven states and one Canadian province, focused mainly on engagements at high schools. This year is booked; for scheduling for next year, contact bookings@myshadowlight.org.
Andrey Sarkanich contributed to the reporting for this article.