Much of the focus is on what the media was showing the American people leading up to and during World War II, and noted repeatedly how Jewish people were left missing from American media and policy.

Students from a wide area of North Dakota, as far away as Wing, have visited the exhibit.

Mandie Medalen, library director, said almost 500 students have seen it as of Tuesday, Jan 28. Their teachers led them through a guided tour, talking them through nine display walls, styled after the main museum in Washington, D.C.

Chelsea Macbeth, a special education teacher from Towner, explained much of the exhibit to her students, using a provided instruction tool and leading a conversation about the events of the 1930s and ’40s.

Photo by Ben Pifher/MDN Propaganda posters, made by the U.S. government during World War II depicting Hitler and Nazism during the war in stark contrast with media depicting them just before the war are part of the “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibit in the Heart of America Library in Rugby.

As Macbeth walked her students through the exhibit, she started by explaining what the Holocaust of Jews was – “a systematic state sponsored persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators …” Then her prompt asked what Americans knew about the Holocaust and what more could have been done.

By explaining America’s isolationism following World War II, the exhibit introduced the cause of the restrictions on immigration, specifically discussing Jews and other eastern European “undesirables” such as Italians and Slavs. According to the display, much of U.S. immigration was based on pseudoscientific racial theories widely accepted at the time and gave preference to western Europeans.

Later, Macbeth was prompted to explain how even governments outside Germany restricted Jewish immigration, and described barriers such as Visa limits. She described incidents of Americans wanting to help Jewish families, and having to navigate multiple bureaucratic hurdles to do so. She then described how policy evolved in the U.S. slowly, and told how difficult it was for Jews to escape the genocide in Germany.

Next, Macbeth and her students learned about the events of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

After debates whether the U.S. would participate due to the Nazis’ public persecution of Jews, black athletes were discouraged from competing.

Jesse Owens became a well known figure at these Olympics, breaking several world records, and winning four gold medals, the first athlete to do so, as one of 17 black athletes who participated, defying others urging them to stay home.

The class followed along, learning about Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, where Nazis wreaked havoc within German borders, destroying hundreds of synagogues, ransacking Jewish-owned businesses and arresting 30,000 Jewish men.

This is the event that drove their persecution to become front page news in the U.S. Even after Kristallnacht, the exhibit followed the reluctance of foreign countries to accept Jewish refugees, and explains that Nazi propaganda worked to a degree, and Jews were seen to have communist ties and ill will.

Tying into the arrest of the Jewish men, the class then learned about ways Nazi Germany tracked, taxed and otherwise controlled their Jewish populations with an iron fist, requiring things like good conduct cards, monitored by Nazi officials, and special taxes on furniture and clothes. These thorough records allowed the Nazi government to more easily locate and arrest Jewish families at will.

In the latter half of the exhibit, the class was shown America’s reluctance to join the war, and saw what Americans were shown at the time, getting to see the narrative of the war from their eyes.

After learning about Pearl Harbor, the students were shown how the narrative changed in America to drive its people to war, and told of the racism toward Japanese people which led to internment camps, even learning of one within North Dakota, to detain the Japanese and Japanese-Americans on U.S. soil.

The final portion of the exhibit told of the American people learning of the existence of the Nazi concentration camps a year after they had gone to war. Students learned how news of the camps reached Americans in roundabout ways, at first dismissed as rumors by the State Department.

Finally, students learn of policies put into place by President Roosevelt’s administration, after admitting the Holocaust was happening, to send humanitarian aid to Europe toward the end of the war. Students also watched a video featuring a man who was a child in one of the concentration camps.

The exhibit will be at the Heart of America Library until Saturday, Feb. 22.