In honor of Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, a Holocaust survivor and Monuments Man came to Ball State University Wednesday to help people remember the art and culture lost during Adolf Hitler's regime and share his story.
Harry Ettinger spoke about his experience in the Monuments Men during and after World War II. The Monuments Men were responsible for protecting, tracking, locating and returning approximately 5 million cultural artifacts during that time, he said.
"The Nazis perpetrated the greatest plunder and destruction in history," Ettinger said. "To give some kind of idea, one-fifth of all of the culture and buildings and art in Europe was either destroyed or stolen."
A documentary based on Lynn Nicholas's book "The Rape of Europa" was shown along with Ettinger's speech. The documentary shed light on the amount of stolen artifacts by Nazi Germany for purification purposes. Hitler destroyed most modern art, saying that it went against German values and that modern artists were mentally inferior. All other art was kept for the personal collections of the Nazis.
"This documentary shows a moment in history, that was asleep for decades, now being told," Ettinger said as he began his personal story describing his involvement in finding lost European art. "I was very, very lucky. I was able to get out before the start of the violence in my city. Thirty thousand Jewish men from my town were sent to concentration camps just a month after I had left for the States."
When the United States entered the war, Ettinger was sent overseas. He was stopped from going into combat on his 19th birthday after the Battle of the Bulge, Ettinger said. He was later offered but declined a position investigating rapes. He ended up dealing with thousands of rapes as Monuments Man, he said.
The documentary made some members of the audience emotional.
Senior architecture major Ben Herring, saw the importance in the event.
"I've only been outside of the United States one time," Herring said. "And that being the case, any experience where I can have direct contact with a witness of an event on a global scale is of value to me."
The documentary said the art is a symbol of the culture that was punctured by the Nazis. Nicholas said thousands of works were lost, but thousands were also discovered and returned to the museums and families they belonged to.
"There is no life without these treasures, these memories, that we get from our ancestors," Ettinger said. "No nation can exist without culture or history."
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