Unforgettable Perspective

by  Abigail Kutschinski

Growing up in the early 2000s, I have been taught the important lessons about the horrors of the Holocaust. I’ve been to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and listened to the story of a survivor at our local Holocaust Center in Maitland. However, seeing and hearing lessons about the Holocaust is entirely different from experiencing even a tiny fraction of the trauma endured by countless Jews during the 1930s and ‘40s. ShadowLight, a Canadian nonprofit organization, knows what a powerful teacher experience can be, so ShadowLight is currently touring North America with a replica cattle car like those used to transport hundreds of thousands of Jews between concentration camps and – for far too many – to their deaths.

ShadowLight brought the cattle car to schools and organizations across Florida from December through March as part of an exhibit titled The Cattle Car: Stepping In and Out of Darkness. The exhibit visited numerous high schools and universities throughout our community, and I was fortunate enough to experience ShadowLight’s presentation when it visited my high school in February.

Walking into this exhibit, I had a moment of trepidation – a feeling that was shared by my peers who described the cattle car as “terrifying and eerie, yet inspiring.” The car was dark and cramped with my class all standing inside, but this was nothing compared to what the victims of the Holocaust faced. The slatted walls of the cattle car blocked out most of the bright Florida sun as my class filed into the car. My attention was immediately drawn to the footprints painted on the floor of the exhibit. One hundred pairs of shoe prints spanned the length of the car – each one representing a spot where a victim of the Holocaust would have stood. This shocked my entire class. We felt cramped and slightly claustrophobic with only 20 of us standing inside the hot car for 20 minutes, so it was difficult to imagine being packed into the car with 99 other people for days on end. 

Zach Landes, a freshman at the University of Central Florida who toured the car during its stop at UCF, describes it “as an emotional yet very educational and in-depth look into how people suffered during the Holocaust.”

The exhibit features a 20-minute presentation that projects the stories of two Holocaust survivors onto the inner walls of the cattle car. Their stories travel across the walls creating an immersive experience that requires the audience to constantly scan the walls in order to view the entire presentation. ShadowLight filled the exhibit with statistics, graphics, and pictures so that participants could grasp the severity of the Holocaust. The presentation goes chronologically through the survivors’ stories while also taking the time to acknowledge those who did not survive. 

As my class left the cattle car, everyone was quiet; each of us individually reflecting on what we had witnessed. The presentation was entirely different from anything we had seen before. The immersive experience gave us the opportunity to understand to a much greater degree what the victims of the Holocaust went through. After experiencing a piece of what my own ancestors faced, I left the presentation with a renewed appreciation for my Jewish heritage. This exhibit also inspired me to base one of my final school projects on the Jewish cultural identity. 

Many students in the Central Florida area were touched by ShadowLight’s message including Sophia Schier, a junior at Lake Highland Preparatory School. She found the exhibit to be extremely moving, saying, “The perspective you get from listening to a survivor of the Holocaust is unlike any other education.”

“This interactive experience is one that taught me a lot and really put the Holocaust into a first-person perspective,” says Chelsea Horwitz, another UCF freshman. “It’s [perfect] for students who know a lot about the Holocaust and for [those] who don’t.” 

The Cattle Car: Stepping In and Out of Darkness exhibit seeks to enable people of all ages, especially students, to connect to the Holocaust on a personal level, both emotionally and physically, and inspire them to make a positive impact on the current world by infusing them with a sense of responsibility and empowerment. The Central Florida community embraced this mission as students and adults visited the exhibit, leaving them motivated to advocate for change within our own communities as we fight against hate and ignorance.