The CSU East Bay library is currently playing host to a traveling Holocaust exhibit established by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance called “The Courage to Remember.”
With nearly 200 photos and 40 posters on display, the exhibit analyzes the events that created one of the biggest destructions of human beings in history; from the early years of the Nazi party, to the formation of the “Final Solution;” from Europe being overtaken by Nazism, to the road of liberation and rebuilding lives.

The exhibit has been traveling all over the state, having been recently on display at Sacramento State University, and will stay in the CSUEB library until Feb. 20.

When the people in charge of the exhibit were looking for a Bay Area location, they contacted librarian Linda Dobb to see if CSUEB would be interested.

Already within its first week, students have taken interest to the exhibit and would stop by the posters and read them.

“There is some interest in these things here at the university, so I’m awfully glad that we got it,” Dobb said.  “I don’t know whether they looked around to see what other California State Universities were in the Bay Area and chose us or whatever, but I was very glad that they did and I just made arrangements for them to bring it here.”

“It’s very well done and it has good pictures and it’s not a lot of text to read but enough text to give you the story and the importance of it is to not [let it] happen again; that we do not allow something like that to ever happen again anywhere,” she added.

Dobb hopes to also have a professor from the History department, whose area of expertise is the Holocaust, give a presentation about it eventually and invite the community at large to come.

While “The Courage to Remember” exhibit is on display on the second floor of the library, books and other pieces of literature about the Holocaust straight off the shelves have been put on display in the exhibit case on the first floor.  

Books on display include “Night” by Elie Wiesel and “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank. 

Night supervisor Jared Mariconi, who was also responsible for the small Japanese internment camp exhibit that was on display last quarter, set up the new exhibit.

“What we try to do with each exhibition was we try to highlight some of the diversity of the experience of the Holocaust as it is in selected literature,” he explained.  “We really wanted to highlight the fact that these are all resources that are readily available to the campus.”

Dobb emphasized how students will be able to get two things out of this exhibit: to prevent a tragedy like the Holocaust from ever happening again and to explore the library for books like the ones on display.
“We put up exhibits like this and we hope students get something out of them.  The sponsor of this exhibit hopes, again, that what it will mean to people is that we should never forget that something bad happened and it can always happen again, unless all of us remember that we shouldn’t let bad things happen,” said Dobb.  “So I think that’s a good thing, a good lesson. We always like to encourage students to explore our library.”