Slivers of light shine through the cracks between the wooden boards of the walls, providing the only light in the narrow space of the train car.
Black painted footprints cover the floor. Each set is different. Some appear to be the bottoms of high heels. Others, representing children, are only a few inches long.
The Hate Ends Now Cattle Car, a traveling exhibit created by the nonprofit Shadowlight, stood behind the Bost Extension Center on the Mississippi State University campus on Friday afternoon. The replica cattle car displayed pieces of Holocaust history in a presentation projected on the walls, including two survivors’ stories of being brought to a concentration camp.
“There were 100 people in (each cattle car) without access to facilities,” Hate Ends Now CEO Todd Cohn told The Dispatch. “No food. No water. In the winter, they froze. In the summer, they overheated. And they were shipped off to one of tens of thousands of different work camps, labor camps, ghettos, or to one of six different sites of industrial murder. But it didn’t start with the cattle car. It did start with everyday people like you and me not standing up to hate.”
Hate Ends Now CEO Todd Cohn said the exhibit is not designed to get an emotional reaction or be an “experience” for participants. Instead, it is an educational display on how quickly hate can grow.
The cattle car exhibit and its accompanying display of artifacts — including propaganda posters, childrens’ books, ID cards, a striped prison uniform and more — showed the history of the Holocaust, ranging from the rise of Nazi propaganda in the 1920s to the liberation of concentration camp survivors in the 1940s, and the aftermath.
Inside of the replica cattle car, a multimedia presentation displayed images of the Holocaust and videos of survivors Hedy Bohm and Nate Leipciger telling their stories of being pulled from their normal lives to be brought to concentration camps.
The presentation also includes a display of the number of victims killed by the Holocaust in different minority groups, including Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, Black people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities and others.
The Holocaust claimed more than 11 million lives.
‘Never again?’
At the end, the presentation asks the viewer to think critically about how quickly hatred and bigotry can build by presenting modern articles on the walls on different kinds of conflicts, and asking the question, “Never again?”
Hillel, the Jewish Student Association at Mississippi State University, co-sponsored the cattle car event on campus. Students from the organization were present throughout the day, helping to promote the event and bring in groups of participants into the car.
Adam Nathan, president of Hillel, said he sees the message of Hate Ends Now as a “call to action” against hatred in all forms. He also called the exhibit “particularly moving” right now due to the “rise in anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.”
“One thing that I liked was just kind of hearing the voices of the survivors,” Nathan said. “You know, they speak with a Yiddish accent. Yiddish is a nearly extinct language now, and it’s because so many Yiddish speakers were living in Poland and Germany and Russia at the time and were massacred during the Holocaust. It’s one of those pieces of Jewish culture that’s nice to hear.”
Cohn said the exhibit uses multimedia elements because it is typically used with high school and college students. The exhibit helps to keep the younger generation’s attention better than a textbook alone can, he said, helping participants to better understand the message.
Dylan Warnes, artifact educator with the cattle car exhibit, started working with the traveling exhibit in September. She said the exhibit also helps participants to better understand the history because they can connect to the survivors’ stories.
“A big part of why listening to Nate and Hedy and their stories is that we primarily go to high schools,” Warnes said. “When they were being transported … they were 15 and 14. So they were about the same age as primarily the ones listening to it.”
Groups of about 25 people cycled through the exhibit every 30 minutes throughout the day. Warnes said some attendees were more overwhelmed by the exhibit than others.
“I think a lot of people know going into it that they’re going to be inside and be seeing it, and then once the doors close and it gets dark, you realize how small it really feels,” she said. “Even when you’re just in a (small group) it really changes how you’re going to hear these stories.”
Mark Kimoto, secretary of Hillel, said he was glad an exhibit like this was on the MSU campus as an opportunity to get people to learn about historical events, “know the atrocities, not forget and not let it happen again.”
“It was a somewhat sobering experience,” Kimoto said. “Being Jewish, I have a good amount of prior knowledge about the Holocaust, but they presented this in a way that was a lot more engaging and more effective.”
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 38 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
