What does genocide look like? An Auschwitz exhibit in Boston tries to answer | Analysis [Video]

What does genocide look like?

It’s the hairbrushes. It’s the coffee pots and plates. The razors and shaving brushes. The safety pins and the broken pairs of glasses.

It’s empty suitcases. It’s the child’s shoe with one sock still in it.

It’s the survivors’ memories of a place that’s become synonymous with the worst in human savagery: The woman whose shaved hair “mingled with my tears” as a barber stripped her of her identity; the man with the numbers on his arm who said his blood still curdled, decades later, every time he heard a child’s cries.

And on a cold, gray Wednesday morning in May, hundreds gathered at The Castle at Park Plaza in Boston’s Back Bay to bear witness to that history.