Evansville Wartime Museum to open new Holocaust exhibit

HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – The Evansville Wartime Museum will soon open the Rechnic Holocaust Exhibit on October 3, with a preview that is not open to the public on September 30.

Officials say on September 30, Evansville Wartime Museum members, donors and others will preview the Rechnic Holocaust Exhibit at the Evansville Wartime Museum from 4 to 6 p.m. The Rechnic Holocaust Exhibit opens to the public on October 3 during regular hours at the Evansville Wartime Museum.

According to the Evansville Wartime Museum Events Committee, the Holocaust was the state-sponsored murder of six millions Jewish people and millions of others by Nazi Germans and their collaborators in Europe. The Rechnic Exhibit includes digital maps of the Holocaust and features a 25’ long illustrated timeline of both the Holocaust in Europe 1933-1945 and the Rechnic family during the years before WWII started in their native Poland in September 1939 and through liberation in 1945.

Officials explain Irene Rechnic, who was 10 years old, was a hidden child in 1944-45. Survivors of the Holocaust, the impoverished Rechnics arrived in Evansville in 1953 to join family members. After years of hard work, Edward and Regina Rechnic owned and operated Edwards Manufacturing Co. in downtown Evansville, where clothes were made upstairs and sold downstairs. Edwards Manufacturing Co. employed as many as 90 people.

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