My father survived Auschwitz, 1941-1945. He died last year. Since then, I've been working on building a diorama of Auschwitz, for his memory and to teach my children. I need feedback on how I can approach this without looking tasteless and amateur. All comments welcome.
I'm building a crematorium from a dairy/creamery HO scale train model. For the interior, I'm lighting it with a lamp that shines on a closed crematorium oven--nothing else. Below the crematorium, there will be two long rooms, made of balsa and painted concrete gray. One will be the gas chamber, with purple Zyklon B stains on the walls, but no dead bodies. The other room will be the undressing room, painted concrete gray, with 1/72 scale civilians and Nazis in various poses.
The prisoners barracks and the camp administration building (3 buildings in all) are converted Novel Iron Works buildings. Interiors will show the barracks bunks (balsa wood) and SS offices filled with SS posters, prisoner luggage, and SS officers milling about. Guard towers are made from HO scale Atlas elevated switch towers, altered to look like the real thing. The whole area will be surrounded by the infamous "triple fence" of barbed wire. The fenceline will be lighted by street lights. I chose all buildings with extreme care to closely duplicate the buildings at Auschwitz.
The real action/horror takes place outside the buildings. One vignette will be Nazis and prisoners in an execution line. One vignette will be a discipline line, with a half-naked prisoner being whipped by Nazis as others are forced to watch. One vignette will be a hanging. One vignette will be the burning of corpses in an outdor cremation pit. One vignette will be Dr. Mengele (SS doctor and executioner) making a "selektion" to send civilians to their deaths. A cattle car railroad boxcar spilling dead bodies and a German Army truck, also spilling dead bodies, will be in the back area of the diorama. The front of the diorama will be a slightly fanciful depiction of Russian Army infantry fighting retreating Germans on the day of liberation, January 26, 1945. The background painting will be of the rest of the camp and Auschwitz II-Birkenau in the distant background.
Tell me how far I should go with this nightmare. I was filled with sadness at times, making these horrid vignettes and imagining what my father went through. My goal is to make something good enough to be displayed at the local high school, or even the Holocaust Museum in Washington, from which I was inspired.