The Auschwitz Exhibition

This past weekend I saw a traveling exhibition in Boston about the Auschwitz concentration camp. It contains over 700 objects from shoes to gas masks to implements of torture and experimentation. The exhibit was co-produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and has been in several other locations but is only up for a few more days in Boston. There is no information about where it might be next. You can read more about it on their site. 

The exhibit's tag line "Not long ago. Not far away." is a great reminder that those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. In today's political climate where Holocaust deniers and Nazi admirers are given significant air time in the media, candidates for the highest offices use their rhetoric and they are winning elections in Germany, it is more important than ever that these stories and artifacts are presented to refute the denials. You came here for maps? This exhibit delivers plenty of them, more than I can easily show in one post. Here are some of the more significant examples.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, a Polish town that began as a typical fenced medieval settlement. It became important as a railway junction and also for it's location on the border (at various times) of nations, provinces and occupied areas. This map highlights the railways lines and shades in the locations of the camps as well as the rubber factory that used slave labor from the camps.

The camp originally housed mostly Poles who did not completely cooperate with their occupiers but in time it became a death camp for Jews, Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, and political prisoners. Here is a map of the Auschwitz camp and the expanded Birkenau camp to the west of it. 

via Yad Vashem

I took a picture of it but I'm using a copy from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, because it is much more clear than what I was able to capture. 

The camps grew into a major network.

Jews were rounded up throughout German occupied and allied countries and deported to Auschwitz as this huge wall map shows.

In 1945 as the Russian army started closing in on the area, the surviving prisoners were subjected to even more brutality as they were forcibly marched, on foot and then in rail cars in the middle of winter to other camps deeper in Germany. This was in part to try to continue hiding Nazi atrocities from the rest of the world.

There are quite a few other maps including a world ethnographic map from 1897 exemplifying the racial attitudes of the time, a map of Madagascar, where it was proposed that Jews be deported and this map from 1936 of concentration camps and prisons, published by exiles seeking to dissuade international athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics that year.

The exhibition runs through this weekend at the Castle at Park Plaza in Boston 

Here are some useful links for more information:

The exhibition's web site

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Yad Vashem

A Blue Map of China

This past weekend I finally got to the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library to see their exhibit, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China on one of its final days. Yes, I should have visited months ago when I could have encouraged readers to see it but though they have taken it down, you can still look at the digital exhibit. The main focus of the exhibit is two large map prints done in Prussian blue; one terrestrial and one celestial. Here is my photo of the geographic map as it was displayed.

Apologies for the yellowing effect that seems to happen on my phone. The lines and text are white. This map titled "Complete map of the geography of the everlasting, unified Great Qing Dynasty" was printed by making a positive image rubbing on a woodblock. Prussian blue, an iron based compound, was developed in Berlin but the Chinese learned to make it from local materials. 

Here is a description from the online exhibit: "Several geophysical attributes help to orient the viewer. The two vivid white lines trace out the Yellow River (north) and the Yangzi River (south). Just north of the Yellow River is a stippled band of white dots that marks the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts. Wave patterns indicate oceans, including the Atlantic (top left) and Pacific (occupying much of the second panel from right). There are two prominent human-made structures. The Great Wall, with its distinctive crenellated wall pattern, runs between the Yellow River and the Gobi Desert. The Willow Palisade, which emerges close to where the Great Wall meets the sea, is shown with cross-hatched lines."

Here is a detail from the map.

The full map can be seen here. Place names are "encoded toponyms"- what this really means is that the place names are placed inside of shapes representing their administrative order. Here is a legend from the Leventhal Center web site,

and here is an older map where the shapes are placed next to the text instead.

I could talk about the star chart but that could be another entire post and I don't really have the knowledge to say much about it. Here is a sample.

via Leventhal Map Center

One final picture: the Leventhal Center usually has a map placed on the floor at their entrance. The one for this exhibit outlines some of the features for better comprehension. The lighting and size made it hard to get a complete picture but here is a sample.

You can read more and see many more maps and earlier versions of these on their online exhibit.