Through the Lens of Faith is a temporary outdoor exhibition designed by Studio Libeskind in association with the Amud Aish Memorial Museum, installed at the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.

The exhibit is curated and conceptually developed by Henri Lustiger Thaler of the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn, New York.The exhibition is composed of 21 color portraits taken by Caryl Englander of Jewish, Polish and Sinti survivors of the camp, each with their own testimony.

Three-meter-tall, vertical stainless steel panels line up on both sides of a path that veers off the route that leads to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. The repetitive pattern of the panels is reminiscent of the stripes from a prisoner’s uniform, suggesting confinement, while the exterior mirrored surfaces reflect the surrounding landscape and suggest a physical and spiritual freedom.

As visitors enter the installation, they encounter the portraits; each one is framed in a recessed panel, overlaid with black glass door etched with the words of the subject’s first-person experiential account of Auschwitz and the perseverance of their faith. Below each didactic is data on the families that was created by survivors after the Holocaust. Each captures the longing for family renewal among this population after the genocide. The installation is replete with visual and personal self-narrations, filling in the blank spaces of the visitor experience of Auschwitz.

The exhibit marks the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of the camp in 1945.

For more background info and testimonies of the survivors, please visit:
http://tlofauschwitz.org/

Bouwery’s Johan van Lierop was the project architect of the installation while working at Studio Libeskind.