Daniel Magilow, assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, has produced an exhibition on life leading up to and during the Holocaust—”In Her Father’s Eyes: A Slovak Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust”—which will be showing on the first floor of the John C. Hodges Library from October 6 to December 2, 2008.
The exhibition tells the story of a young girl with uncanny affinities to Anne Frank. In 1929, Béla Weichherz, a traveling salesman from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, began an illustrated diary about his daughter, Kitty. In this diary, which he kept throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, he recorded countless details about all aspects of her life. Soon after the Holocaust began, Béla’s journal ended, and neither Kitty nor her parents survived. This exhibition is a powerful and poignant document of daily life in Europe on the eve of Hitler’s Final Solution.
Magilow’s book about Kitty, In Her Father’s Eyes: A Slovak Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust, will be available from Rutgers University Press in October.