BRATTLEBORO — Brooks Memorial Library's Fine Arts Committee will host an exhibit of approximately 18 posters from a collection donated to the library in 1994 by the family of Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Fagelman. The posters will be on display for the month of April in the library's Main Room.
The entire collection comprises 40 posters containing images and text about the persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany during the period of 1933–1945.
The posters are part of a traveling exhibition, The Courage to Remember, produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which debuted in Vienna, Austria, in 1988.
In conjunction with the exhibit, on Sunday, April 3, at 2 p.m. in the library's Main Room, a lecture titled Daily Life in Nazi Germany will be presented by C. Paul Vincent, Ph.D., a professor of Holocaust studies and history at Keene (N.H.) State College. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Vincent is chair of Keene State's academic program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and served as director of the college's Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies from 1998 to 2007. With a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1980), he has taught at Keene State since 1985, when he arrived as director of the Mason Library.
Vincent is the author of two books: The Politics of Hunger: The Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Ohio University Press, 1985) and A Historical Dictionary of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918–1933 (Greenwood Press, 1997).
The Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in 1977 as an international Jewish human rights organization. Its primary goal is to preserve the memory of the Holocaust by encouraging tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach, and social action.
Other issues the Center focuses on are Middle East affairs, prosecution of Nazi war criminals, extremist groups, neo-Nazism, and hate on the Internet. The center is headquartered in Los Angeles, and maintains offices in major cities around the world.
The talk and exhibit are sponsored by the Fine Arts Committee of Brooks Memorial Library. The committee, composed of library trustees, former trustees, and community volunteers, is responsible for the care and display of the library's collection of fine arts as well as for scheduling and promotion of public art exhibits in the library.