SEOUL, January 28 (AJP) -Silence settled over the Democracy Movement Memorial Hall in Seoul on Jan. 27, as the Israeli and German embassies came together to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Beneath the vaulted stillness of the space, remembrance took shape not through speeches alone, but through the collective pause of those gathered.
Around 150 people — diplomats, scholars and ordinary citizens — stood in quiet attention, their faces composed, their gazes drawn inward as much as toward the images before them. In the absence of sound, memory did the speaking.
Titled “Remembering for the Future,” the special exhibition traces the fragile boundary between civilization and its collapse. Works by Jewish-German artist Felix Nussbaum, painted in exile and fear, confront visitors with fractured bodies and haunted landscapes. Nearby, images from “The Auschwitz Album,” preserved by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, document lives suspended between arrival and annihilation — moments captured just before history closed in.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the United Nations in 2005, calls not only for mourning the dead but for vigilance among the living — a reminder that human dignity, once stripped away, is difficult to reclaim.
The exhibition will remain open to the public free of charge from Jan. 28 to March 15, inviting visitors to linger, to look, and to bear witness — not as an act of the past, but as a responsibility carried forward.
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