WRNMMC, Bethesda, Md.   –   An exhibit currently on display at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) observes the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH). The exhibit is located in the America Zone’s corridor between the America Building and America Garage at WRNMMC.

The Days of Remembrance, this year observed from April 16 to April 23, honor victims of the Holocaust. The exhibit at WRNMMC, called “Learning from the Holocaust, The Strength of the Human Spirit,” features artworks by Holocaust victims and survivors interviewed by Dr. Elizabeth Hlavek, a board certified, licensed clinical art therapist, who compiled the artworks. The Holocaust victims created their artworks while in Nazi captivity, allowing them to “bear witness, leave a legacy and retain their humanity,” according to Hlavek.

“This exhibit represents a culminating project originally developed during Dr. Hlavek’s doctoral studies. [She] researched the artists who created while in captivity during the Holocaust to better understand the importance of artmaking in response to tragedy,” explained Maia Magder, WRNMMC’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) officer.

“Approximately 40,000 works of art have been documented since the liberation in 1945,” Hlavek shared. “The artworks were created by those in camps, ghettos and in hiding, epitomizing the power of creativity and the strength of spirit. It is striking, especially from the perspective of art therapy, to consider the concept of artmaking in the midst of a genocide. That a creative impulse could be attained suggests that it supported survival in some way,” she added.

The DEI Council worked with the Arts in Health program at WRNMMC to bring the exhibit to Walter Reed Bethesda.

Magder explained that the U.S. Congress first designated Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust during the late 1970s. On Nov. 1, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed an Executive Order establishing the President's Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

In 1979, the President's Commission on the Holocaust provided the following definition to help guide the commission and Holocaust remembrances: “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War; as night descended, millions of other peoples were swept into this net of death. It was a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence—the sheer numbers killed—but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenseless civilian populations. The decision to kill every Jew everywhere in Europe: the definition of Jew as a target for death transcended all boundaries.”

Although Jews were the primary Holocaust victims, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered oppression and death under Nazi Germany, Magder added.

The Department of Defense (DOD) used this definition as the foundation of goals for DRVH programs.

The Israeli Parliament (Knesset) established Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah), to be observed on the 27th day of Nisan of the Hebrew calendar. The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, so the date changes each year in the United States.

Observances and remembrance activities occur throughout the Week of Remembrance, which runs from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) through the following Sunday.

For more information about the Days of Remembrance, visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website at https://www.ushmm.org/.