When Tommy Ringart stops in one of the showrooms at Malmö Fair, he is taken. On the walls are pictures of prisoners who have just arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp’s long train platform.
– It’s a little too close. It feels like you are in the middle of it yourself, I have never experienced that before. What strikes me is that people look so calm, they do not understand what to expect, says Tommy Ringart, who is chairman of the association Holocaust survivors in Sweden.
Malmö – fourth stop
It was here that Ringart’s father Jakob and mother Hanna saw their parents for the last time in the summer of 1944 after the Nazis had emptied the ghetto in Polish Lodz. First, men and women were separated – then the next selection took place on the platform.
– My grandfather was going in one direction and then my dad wanted to go with him, but then he got hit by one of the striped ones, as he called them. One of the prisoners who helped. He hit him so that he went in another direction. His parents were murdered directly in the gas chambers, while his father managed to survive, says Tommy Ringart.
The photos, taken by the Nazis themselves, are part of the traveling exhibition “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away ”which opens in Malmö Fair on 26 May.
“The whole history of Europe”
– 90 percent of the victims in Auschwitz were Jews, but in the exhibition we also tell the victims who were Roma and Sinti. About those who were political prisoners or who were there because they were gay, says Luis Ferreiro.
Even before the opening, it is clear that around 25,000 school students will visit the exhibition hall in Hyllie, not far from the Öresund Bridge. The hope is that many Danes will also cross the strait.
– The exhibition is fantastic and everything that is done so that we do not forget what happened during the Holocaust is important. It is part of our history, says Tommy Ringart.