By Kelsey Durham
In an effort to shed new light on one of the lesser-known episodes of World War II, a Korean leader visited the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives in Bayside last week to view an exhibit on the Korean comfort women that has become one of the museum’s most popular items since its opening three years ago.
Sanghui Lee, a political consul and Korean consulate general, visited the Holocaust center on the campus of Queensborough Community College to tour the exhibit “Come from the Shadows: The Comfort Women.” The exhibit features a series of paintings that depict the faces of Korean women who were held as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers when Japan occupied Korea during World War II.
According to the exhibit, nearly 200,000 Korean women as young as 13 were taken from their homes and forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese during the war, but today more than 70 years later, the comfort women issue remains one of the somewhat obscure tragedies of the war and many survivors did not come forward to talk about their experiences until the 1990s.
Arthur Flug, executive director of the Kupferberg Center, said the exhibit opened in 2011 and quickly became one of the most popular showings the museum has had, leading to its unexpected three-year run that has yet to end.
“It’s really become a very powerful exhibit on campus and the student response has become very powerful,” Flug said. “When classes come to see it, the first reaction is usually anger. Not only that this happened, but that they had never heard about it.”
As Lee toured the exhibit, she spoke with Flug about the educational lessons it provides to the more than 150 nationalities who make up Queensborough Community College’s student body. She said there was a lot to be learned from the past and said that without education, future generations would never know the horrors that so many people of this time period endured.
“This is not a matter of the past,” said Lee. “It’s a matter of the present and the future and it’s not just a matter between two countries. It’s about human rights.”
Anita Weisbord, a 91-year-old Douglaston resident who fled Austria to survive the Holocaust during World War II, said she was not familiar with the comfort women issue before she saw the exhibit open at the museum, where she now spends much of her time.
Weisbord said the exhibit resonated with her own childhood memories and said it tied in nicely with the lesson that the Kupferberg Center hopes to convey with its exhibits.
“It just shows you how cruel people can be,” she said. “When Hitler marched into Austria, it was the end of my childhood as I knew it and overnight it was like I became a non-person. The comfort women had similar experiences of suffering and having been treated so badly.”
Weisbord said one painting of a young woman kneeling before her father, who was looking down on her, stuck out and spoke to her about what it was like to endure what the comfort women lived through. She said it showed a common theme that displayed how ashamed the families of the comfort women who survived were when they were finally returned to their parents.
“This father was looking down at this young child, just standing there sort of saying, ‘I don’t want you anymore. You’re merchandise that I don’t want anymore,’” she said. “It’s horrible to think that any child had to go through that.”
Flug said the Kupferberg Center is now trying to raise funds and awareness to make the comfort women exhibit a permanent fixture at the museum, and the school has even started an internship program to allow interested students to learn more about the Korean women. Flug said the visit from the Korean consulate shows that awareness and education continue to be the most successful ways to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
“In another few years, these women who survived are going to be gone,” he said. “Who’s going to tell their story? If we don’t have education, they will be forgotten.”
Reach reporter Kelsey Durham at 718-260-4573 or by e-mail at kdurham@cnglocal.com.
