CHICOPEE — One morning in early March, a semi-trailer carrying an unusual load pulled away from United Nations headquarters in New York, bound for Massachusetts.
Inside was a traveling exhibition called “Forbidden Art,” an installation of photographs of so-called “death camp art,” made during World War II by prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in southern Poland. More than 30,000 visitors had seen it at the UN, including international delegations and ambassadors.
Now the exhibition was heading east to its only scheduled stop in New England — not at a high-profile venue as one might expect, but in the library of the College of Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, a small Catholic arts college founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield.
“No one knows it outside of Western Massachusetts,” said Scott Hartblay, associate professor of social work, who was involved in bringing the show to the school, also known as Elms College.
Somber and startling, the art is a subset of more than 2,000 works by prisoners maintained by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, located on the site of the former Auschwitz camp. The “Forbidden Art” touring show uses photographs of the art, since the original works are too delicate to travel.
Most of the original works were made by artists using any means available, including trash, discarded camp documents, and cigarette paper. The themes reveal “a broad sense of resilience in the face of the hell of the camp,” said Elzbieta Cajzer, head of collections at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in an e-mail interview.
The poignant story of how the works came to be created — at great risk, since making art could be punished with a death sentence — and of how they were hidden, discovered, and collected is the subject of the exhibit.
But how the show found its way to Elms College is another unusual story, involving an interfaith collaboration between Polish and Jewish groups and Elms College, which has an ongoing interest in Poland, the Holocaust, and the region’s Polish heritage. Cameo roles were played by prisoners at nearby Hampden County Correctional Center, who were drafted to unload the 3-ton exhibit, which uses panels of wood slats that resemble the walls of the camp barracks.
“The irony of the situation is amazing. The prisoners were awestruck,” said JJ Przewozniak, who accompanied the exhibit. He is curator of collections for the Michigan-based Polish Mission of the Orchard Lake Schools, a cultural and educational organization which promotes Polish culture, and is the American partner of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
The exhibit has been touring the US since 2012, and visited seven cities before Chicopee. (It made a brief European detour to the Prince of Monaco’s palace because “he wanted it,” said Przewozniak.) Przewozniak hopes to be able to keep it in this area to “help us push the message” of the show throughout New England.
While Elms College in the Pioneer Valley might seem like an unlikely host for “Forbidden Art,” in many ways it’s a natural fit for a school that lists as one of its missions engaging students “in the great moral issues of our time.”
Elms has multiple Polish influences, by virtue of its location. Chicopee has a large Polish population owing to three separate waves of migration beginning in the 1880s. More than 30 percent of the city’s 55,000 population has Polish heritage, according to Stephen Jendrysik, president of the Chicopee Historical Society.
Elms College has a working relationship with the nearby Polish Center of Discovery and Learning, one of two Polish American museums in the US. It has an exchange program with students from Poland, spearheaded by Hartblay, who has a professional interest in “the Polishness of Chicopee,” he said. He teaches a course in human oppression, which covers the Holocaust.
The connection to “Forbidden Art” began circuitously. Hartblay had learned about a traveling play called “Life in a Jar,” based on the true story of a Polish social worker named Irena Sendler who saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto. The play was coming to Springfield at the invitation of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts for a performance in late March, but the organizers hadn’t found a venue. Elms College offered to host it, and it was during a planning meeting of the so-called Sendler Committee that someone from the New England Chapter of the Kosciuszko Foundation, a Polish cultural organization, brought in an article about “Forbidden Art” that had been published in a Chicago Polish newspaper.
“She said, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could bring this to the college?’” Hartblay said.
At first it seemed impossible. “You needed thousands of dollars for transportation costs, big wooden crates, a forklift, loading dock — it seemed prohibitive,” he said. But the Jewish Federation secured a $10,000 grant from the Jewish Endowment Foundation from a fund for Holocaust education. (Using prisoners to unload the exhibit saved costs, as well.)
“I think a perfectly natural question is: Why is this huge exhibit at your little school?” said Hartblay. “We’ve done a lot of things you wouldn’t expect a smaller school to do, like reaching out to Poland. We’re a little place that does big things, with a global vision.”
“Forbidden Art“ which remains at Elms College until April 30, aims to “bring people closer to the authenticity of Auschwitz,” according to Elzbieta Cajzer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. At least 1.3 million people were deported to the vast killing machine of Auschwitz, of which 1.1 million were murdered. The vast majority were Jews, but Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and homosexuals were among other groups exterminated.
JOANNE RATHE/GLOBE STAFF
“Women With Wheelbarrows” by Maria Hiszpanska is one of the photographs of “death camp art” on display in “Forbidden Art” at Elms College.
The art was hidden in many ways — under plank beds, smuggled out in bundles of dirty linens, buried in a forest. Some works document the agony of daily life in the camps, such as the detailed sketch that illustrates the mass murder of emaciated Jewish people. Other pieces are vivid portrayals of life “without regard to the conditions of Auschwitz,” said Cajzer. There are caricatures of SS officers, and even a fairy tale book written and illustrated by prisoners, who hoped that it would find its way to their children.
Art, it seemed, was a temporary respite from atrocity. “I’m drawing nervously, every subject is the good one. It seems that I can bear hunger, thirst and fear, on condition that I am able to draw,” wrote an artist named Halina Olumucka, an Auschwitz survivor.
The president of Elms College, Sister Mary Reap, described the show as “a very spiritual experience at a very deep level. Despite the evil and suffering and being in the presence of death, these people still lived through their artwork. And here we are, all these years later, being able to experience them.”
