Student-Led Exhibit Brings Holocaust Art to Lawrenceville’s Hutchins Galleries

Artwork and personal histories from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Oświęcim, Poland) are now on view at The Lawrenceville School’s Hutchins Galleries, the result of a student-led effort to bring the lived experiences of those imprisoned during the Holocaust to campus.

“The Auschwitz Experience in the art of prisoners,” on display through May 18, features artwork created by prisoners of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp KL Auschwitz. Prepared by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the traveling exhibition offers a deeply personal window into one of history’s darkest chapters.

Inspiration came during Mia and Nico Linert’s (both Class of 2027) summer work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. It was there they began thinking about how to share the stories they encountered more widely.

“When we came to Lawrenceville this year, we realized that the Hutchins Galleries would be a great place to show all that art,” Mia said.

Bringing the Exhibit to Life

Lawrenceville School Rabbi Lauren Levy, who helped connect the students with the gallery, described the exhibit as both meaningful and widely resonant within the community.

“I just thought it was an amazing idea,” said Levy, who teaches in the Religion and Philosophy Department. Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Memorial Day is such a meaningful time of year for our community. When I heard from Mia and Nico about the exhibit I suggested we show it during the time of Holocaust Memorial, and the anniversary of the liberation of the camps. It’s been a really important exhibition for our community here, teaching our students about a chapter in world history many of them know very little about.”

Hutchins Galleries Curator and Gallery Director Melina Guarino was eager to help when approached by Mia and Nico about the project.

“I love collaborating with students and working with them to bring their ideas into the gallery space,” she said.

Like Levy, she feels this exhibit is particularly important in educating students, through art, about “this horrible time in history. . . . There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation online, so I’m hopeful the exhibit will be helpful in correcting that.”

The result is an exhibit featuring 24 panels, reproductions of works held by the museum, pairing visual art with first-person accounts from survivors.

For the Linerts, that connection is rooted in their experience at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, as well as their family history. At the exhibit’s opening, the siblings and their father, Roman Linert, shared recollections of their family’s life in Poland during the Holocaust. He spoke movingly of his grandmother, who risked her life smuggling food to prisoners by hiding it in their worksites.

The exhibit’s core purpose remains deeply personal, moving beyond history as numbers and into lived experience.

“You see exactly what the prisoners saw and how they interpret it into art,” Mia said.

For Nico, the exhibit helps close the distance people sometimes feel from this history.

“People often feel like, since I’m not Jewish, I don’t have to care about this,” he said. “But fundamentally it was humans killing other humans, and it is an issue that everyone should care about.”

Engaging the Community

That perspective has shaped how Lawrentians are engaging with the exhibition. Classes across disciplines have visited the Galleries. Spanish teacher Julio Alcantara brought his Spanish Three classes to the Hutchins Galleries as part of their current study of the arts.

“I felt it would be a meaningful way to connect their current unit to a real-world experience,” Alcantara said.

Students prepared for a graded oral conversation using a prompt that connected the exhibit to a quote by Frida Kahlo: “Yo pinto flores para que así no mueran.” (“I paint flowers so they don’t die.”)

“This allowed them to engage with both the artistic and historical significance of the exhibit while practicing their language skills,” Alcantara said.

Avery Merse ’28, who is in Alcantara’s Spanish Three class, said, “It brought the horrors of the Holocaust to life and helped me better understand the experiences of people in Auschwitz.”

“It took what we were learning beyond books and into something more immediate,” said Miles Sternberg ’27, also in the class. “Even being familiar with this history, I was seeing it through a new lens.”

Making It Personal

For the Linerts, one of the most important goals is to move beyond statistics and into human experience.

“When you hear about the Holocaust, you hear about it as a death toll,” Nico said. “The art makes it more personal.”

That individual connection, they believe, is essential.

“I think it’s one of the most important things we can do right now,” Mia said. “There are so many Holocaust deniers … it’s super important that people know that the Holocaust was real and what happened to the prisoners.”

Nico remarked, “Just because it happened a long time ago doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. We have the same capacity for evil and hate.”

Gallery Information

During the exhibit, the Hutchins Galleries will be open on Mondays (1–4:30 p.m.), Tuesdays (9 a.m.–noon and 1–4:30 p.m.), Wednesdays (noon–6 p.m.), Thursdays (9 a.m.–noon and 1–4:30 p.m.), Fridays (9 a.m.–noon and 1–4:30 p.m.), and Saturdays (9 a.m.–noon). Visits can also be scheduled by appointment by contacting hutchinsgalleries@lawrenceville.org.

For more information, contact Lisa M. Gillard H'17, director of public relations, at lgillard@lawrenceville.org.