October 10 - 11
All Day
The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education teaches the history of the Holocaust, applying its lessons to counter indifference, intolerance, and genocide. We serve Kansas, western Missouri and the Midwest.
Our office is open to the public by appointment. Face masks are required in the office.
Of Blessed Memory
1939-2022
Ralph Berets parents and older sister fled to Holland from Nazi Germany in 1935. They settled in Amersfoort, where his father opened a fabric store and Ralph was born in December 1939. In 1940, the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands. With the help of contacts in the Dutch underground, Ralph’s father arranged for the family to go into hiding, paying their way personally. In May 1945, Ralph and his family were liberated by the Canadians. In 1951, the family immigrated to the United States.
Part of the 2022 Film Series – this is the Kansas premiere of Three Minutes: A Lengthening. In a found holiday film from 1938, the Jewish inhabitants of a small Polish village crowd in front of the camera. The grim, inevitable reality is that hardly any of them survived the Holocaust. In this quest for answers, the three-minute color film is closely analyzed by repeating it over and over. Who are the people who appear before the camera? What do the grainy letters above the store say? By zooming in, showing the footage frame by frame or enlarging details, the end of the film is constantly postponed — and with it the fate of the villagers. Off camera, a survivor and a descendant talk about the village and its inhabitants, remembering these lives to create a moving cinematic monument. (69 minutes)
A pioneer of queer Holocaust history, Anna Hájková, explores the topics of love, sexual barter, and sexual violence in the Holocaust. She examines how it came to be that this history remains yet carries a stigma, even in 2022.
Dr. Anna Hájková is associate professor at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a study of transgressive sexuality in the Holocaust. Her work on queer history of the Holocaust was published in Czech, German, British, American, and Israeli newspapers and was awarded the Orfeo Iris Prize 2020.
Thank you for your remarkable response to the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. All presentations from the Auschwitz Speaker Series are available here.
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