Home / Blog / What we carry after bearing witness: Reflections on visiting the Auschwitz exhibition at the ROM

What we carry after bearing witness: Reflections on visiting the Auschwitz exhibition at the ROM

Posted in : Blog
Posted on : May 27, 2025

By Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere

May is Jewish Heritage Month in Canada – a time to honour Jewish culture, history, and resilience. It’s also a time to reflect on the unthinkable chapters that shaped the 20th century – and to understand what they ask of us today.

A few of us from CCDI recently visited the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition, Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away. We went in knowing it would be difficult. What we may not have been prepared for was how deeply we were moved, and how much it would reveal about the present moment in which we’re living.

In the days since our visit, we took some time to debrief as a staff. What stayed long after we left the exhibit wasn’t the history – it was how human it all was. How deeply personal. The stories weren’t distant or abstract. They were tactile and intimate.

“What stood out for me was the humanization of the exhibit,” Josephine Njoh, Director of Partner Relations, CCDI. “A lot of times, we hear about events that have happened in history and as catastrophic as they are, they're not individualized and personalized. Hearing individual stories, seeing clothing, shoes, really brought home that these are individuals. These were people with families and names and careers, and we can all relate to that.”

This rang deafeningly true throughout the exhibit. You move past letters, photographs, everyday objects – a child’s shoe, a worn suitcase – and you begin to grasp the scale of loss through the smallest of details. The banality of it is chilling: the train timetables, the uniforms, the files. The genocide didn’t begin in the camps. It began with bureaucracy, with borders, with silence.

“One of the rooms had a door from a gas chamber at Auschwitz,” Rosiane Torres, Events Coordinator, CCDI. “And there was a note saying the workers who manufactured it were proud to support the great Germany. I thought maybe society at the time didn’t really know what was happening. But no – many of them did. And they supported it. It reminded me that even today, many organizations benefit from systems of violence. There are echoes of this everywhere.”

In our work, we often talk about systems – how they’re built, who they serve, who they erase. But seeing it laid bare in that exhibition made it harder to talk about systems as something abstract. This was not a lesson in history. It was a confrontation with complicity. It was a mirror.

“This exhibition was an incredibly rich learning opportunity,” Annika Fenton, Business Development Manager, CCDI, said. “I’ve attended many Holocaust education events before, but this one stood out in how it laid bare the horrors of the tragedy without embellishment. It let the grotesque facts speak for themselves. The context was incredibly informative, and deeply heart-wrenching.”

Since the visit, we’ve talked about how the experience made us reflect on our present-day—on who is being detained, deported, surveilled, or left to perish under the weight of policy. We talked about how the language of “order” and “justice” is still used to justify cruelty. And we asked ourselves: what does “never again” really mean if we look away now?

This exhibit doesn’t offer easy closure. It doesn’t tie things up neatly. It leaves you sitting with discomfort, with grief, with questions. But it also leaves you with clarity.

Jewish Heritage Month is not only a time for memory. It is a time for moral clarity. For courage. For action.

If you are in or near Toronto, please make time to visit Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away. before it closes on September 1, 2025. Go with someone. Talk about it after. Let it challenge you. Let it change you.

Because remembrance alone is not enough.
We must respond. We must resist.

Tags CDNdiversity CCDI Diversity Inclusion Equity Accessibility DEI DEIA IDEA Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion