Busloads of students got a firsthand look at history on April 20 when the 22nd floor of the Capitol was turned into an exhibition site for a widely acclaimed project called “Two Regimes.”
With the presentation of “Two Regimes,” which will continue through June 2, many of Tallahassee’s young people have likely come to a greater grasp of how Russia’s war on Ukraine with the resulting loss of life and destruction and the tragedy of an earlier time, the Holocaust, so sadly resonate together.
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Four bus-loads of students from Chiles High School and from Swift Creek Middle School and a group of 68 students from Godby got to see, hear, and perhaps feel the experiences of a mother and daughter who were survivors of two genocides by two regimes — Stalin’s 1932-33 forced famine on Ukraine and Hitler’s Holocaust during the Second World War.
With its second grant to the Foundation for Leon County Schools, the Legislature, along with the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture are sponsoring the Two Regimes project. The expressed purpose is to encourage “awareness and dialogue about oppression, suppression, prejudice, dictatorships, and war and its effects on populations in global societies.”
The nearly 1,200 students who passed through the exhibit will have been well-prepared. Provided by the Foundation, lesson plans and an eight-minute film created by film-maker, Doug Darlington, will have laid the foundation for discussions on a subject that is both relevant and sensitive.
Extracted from their history books and from the nightly news, place names will be familiar to Tallahassee students: Ukraine, Kiev, Mariupol. And sadly, words like, “tanks,” “bombings,” and “death toll,” will be too.
The story told by the exhibition is a very personal one, portrayed in passages from the diary of Ukranian mother, Teodora Verbitskaya, and in the paintings of her daughter, artist Nadia Werbitzky.
At the April 20 opening, School Superintendent Rocky Hanna spoke, connecting the past with today’s present.
Father Tim Holeda, who is Ukrainian, spoke of tolerance, and offered practical ways for youth to demonstrate it. Rabbi Michael Shields gave an historical overview of Jews’ coming to America and the 1,000-year history of Jews in Ukraine, as well as how to stand up to antisemitism.
And finally, Debra Brigman sang an original song by Diane Whitney from the musical “Teodora,” based on the “Two Regimes” imagery and Dr. Benjamin Sung, Associate Professor of Strings at FSU and Marcus Pizzaro performed the haunting “Melody,” a Ukrainian folk song which left the young listeners stilled with emotion.
The timing of the exhibit comes as local public relations firm Sachs Media and the Holocaust Education Resource Council released an alarming survey on the darkest chapter in modern world history that revealed widespread misunderstanding – and even real doubts – among a significant number of Americans.
As Americans observe Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) on April 28, the survey revealed that 1 in 10 Americans believe many historical details about it have been altered or exaggerated, or that the Holocaust is actually a myth.
Beyond what Americans understand or believe about history, 41% report having seen Nazi symbols in their communities or online in the past five years.
The HERC survey found that 93% of Americans believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, and 80% believe something horrific like it could happen again. Despite this commitment to knowledge, the survey also found that 1 in 5 (21%) Americans don’t know that the Holocaust occurred during World War II and 1 in 4 (25%) can’t correctly identify the notorious Auschwitz as a concentration camp.
“The Holocaust decimated almost an entire population of innocent people, all in the name of advancing a vile philosophy of hatred,” said Barbara Goldstein, Executive Director of HERC. “The next generation is our hope for a better world, and this survey shows that education is still our best tool against hate.”
Over the last 22 years and its dozens of presentations, the story of how the “Two Regimes” exhibition came to be has been told many times.
The serendipity of finding the trove of 118 oil paintings and 150 sketches along with the deteriorated diary that accompanied them is matched only by the single-minded mission of two women, Mimi Shaw and Kelly Bowen, to bring the forgotten memories to light.
In 2000, Mimi Shaw was taken by an artist friend to an estate sale “in the middle of rural North Florida.” There she saw piles of mildewed paintings stacked under plastic beneath the old clapboard house.
Later she discovered there were crumbling trunks with diaries written in a foreign language. Immediately entranced by the vibrant paintings whose creator no one knew, Shaw began a quest to identify and collect as many of the works as she could. “I used our savings and borrowed from family to obtain the works,” she said.
With a tip from a rural neighbor, she got an address and a name: Nadia Werbitzky, an old woman by then, living in Baltimore. Shaw says that they corresponded for over a year, and then she flew to Maryland where Werbitzky, in her 80s, lived in poverty but was still painting.
In the meantime, Shaw had had one diary translated into English and with it and Werbitzky’s art, the wrenching picture emerged of two women surviving the forced famine Stalin had inflicted upon the Ukraine in 1932 for its failure to produce enough grain from the recently collectivized Soviet farms.
Nearly 4 million Ukrainians died of hunger or perished in Siberia in Stalin’s retribution.
But of course, that wasn’t all. Not even eight years later, the Nazis invaded the U.S.S.R. and 7,500 Jews died in Mariupol over three days in 1941. Though Verbitskaya and Werbitzky were Christian, they spent time in a Nazi detention camp as well, eventually making their circuitous way to the United States.
Elie Wiesel has written, “Survivors must bear witness for the dead, for to forget them would be akin to killing them a second time.”
The “Two Regimes” exhibition is testimony to what history and its players have to tell us, its tendency to repeat lessons not learned, and a tribute to all who have withstood aggression and bravely stood for hope.
The exhibition will remain at the Capitol until June 2 and a special free benefit concert will take place April 30 at Blessed Sacrament Church.
What: Concert of music to remember, honor and mourn; benefit for for Ukrainian Health Providers for Military and Civilian Wounded.
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, April 30
Where: Blessed Sacrament Church, 624 Miccosukee Road
Cost: Free and open to the public
Details: Visit tworegimes.com; live stream at bsctlh.com
What: Community Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day with Dr. Dan Leshem, Holocaust Scholar, FSU Hillel Director, “The Innocents of War: Yesterday and Today”
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, April 28
Where: Tallahassee Community College, Workforce Development Building
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