The International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust takes place Jan. 27.
The story of Edna C. Southard’s family is told in part through the loan of photographs, documents, art, and other personal possessions that document the life of her grandmother Erna Alexander, who was born in Germany and came of age at the beginning of World War I.
Southard, 80, retired curator of collections and exhibitions of the Miami University Art Museum, has taken several of her close friends through the exhibit.
She called the artifacts displayed in six showcases from her grandmother “very moving.”
Southard, who served two terms on Oxford City Council, hopes those who attend the exhibit learn to “stand up for other people, those who need help. Not be bystanders, but up standers. We have to make a difference today, now.
“We have to keep learning from history.”
Southard is helping to tell the story of the Holocaust through the few artifacts of her family that survived the horrors of the systematic annihilation of Jews in Germany and all of Europe.
In 1938, her family’s department store was destroyed during Kristallnacht, the government-sponsored anti-semitic riot known as the Night of Broken Glass.
Two years later, Erna and her husband Arnold Alexander were officially stripped of their German citizenship, Southard said.
They fled to Belgium and went into hiding, but Arnold was captured and deported to Auschwitz, dying on the train transport. Erna stayed with a family in Belgium and cared for their daughter.
The exhibit includes artwork that Southard’s grandmother completed after she immigrated to the U.S. in 1947. The artwork was a way for her to cope with what she had lost and endured during the wartime years, Southard said.
Erna became a U.S. citizen in 1952, one week before her 60th birthday. Required to pass a citizenship test and demonstrate fluency in English, she used a pocket dictionary for assistance and played Scrabble.
She survived the war and was eventually reunited with her daughter, Lotte, Southard’s mother.
When Southard was born in 1945, her family didn’t know if her grandmother was still alive. According to Jewish tradition, a person can’t be named after a relative unless that person is deceased.
So Edna’s first name is one letter different than her grandmother’s.
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