About eight years ago, Heidi Straus set off on a quest to procure extraordinarily rare — and extraordinarily important — artifacts pertinent to the Holocaust.

Straus’ exhaustive journey began with a trip to her family’s ancestral home of Poland, where she toured concentration camps and first connected with a dealer of Holocaust-related pieces. She later acquired items through auction houses, private sales, and even generous donors.

As the years passed, the Las Vegas native — and holder of a graduate degree in Holocaust and genocide studies — had secured more than 100 priceless artifacts, housing it all in her residence.

Finally, it was time to fulfill her end goal. That goal? It was not financial — Straus did not build her collection in hopes of someday flipping it for a profit.

Rather, her mission was rooted in education. She wanted to publicly display these poignant artifacts — each of which tell a unique and important story — so her community could learn more about the Holocaust.

What she needed, though, was a partner to work with her on curating a museum-quality exhibit.

Enter UNLV’s History graduate program. It offers an option for students to pursue public history, or the presentation of historical research and interpretation to the public. 

It all started in November 2023, when Straus invited UNLV history professors Gregory Brown and Deirdre Clemente (along with other local educators) to her home to view the collection. Soon after, the idea was hatched for an iteration of the History 749-750, a two-semester graduate course in public history on the topic of the Holocaust.

The course began last August with 16 students and Brown and Straus as instructors, with other faculty including Clemente contributing their expertise. Students studied historical scholarship on the Holocaust and learned the skills necessary to develop an exhibit. They split into small groups, each charged with a different task, such as inventorying the collection and choosing the artifacts; writing scripts for visitor tours; and putting together a publicity plan. All the students worked, either individually or in pairs, to research and write the explanatory texts that would accompany the artifacts.

While UNLV's History Department has developed numerous projects around local history, Brown says this version of History 749-750 offered students a deeper way to explore international history. “The problem is that students need to do work on actual historical artifacts, and those have tended to be local and contemporary — that’s what was made available to us,” he says. “This was a chance to go in a different direction.”

As the course unfolded, however, a not-so-small challenge emerged: Where would the exhibit be housed?

Because Straus’ collection is literally irreplaceable, safety and security was paramount. Clemente — through her connections at the Reid Public History Institute — reached out to the Las Vegas offices of Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo.

The response was positive: The governor’s office, located just south of Harry Reid International Airport, agreed to welcome the exhibit — but with one caveat: It had to be installed in October and removed by mid-March.

That meant an accelerated timeline for the public history course.

“We had anticipated doing most of the coverage of the course material and the methods and historiography between October and March, and then actually building the exhibit in April,” Brown says. “So we had to kind of turn the course upside down and in some ways do it backwards by building the exhibit first.”

They did indeed beat the clock, though, and on Nov. 19 — roughly a year after Straus and UNLV first connected — “The Holocaust: Reconstructing Shattered Humanity” opened to visitors.

The exhibit’s title reflects the all-encompassing nature of the Holocaust-related artifacts on display. 

“Many of the stories we tell are about people’s lives before the series of events that we associate with the Holocaust and the dissolution of those lives in some way or another — be it deportation, murder, despoliation, etc. And then in many instances, it’s about reconstruction,” Brown says. “Because that’s part of the story — the displaced persons and ultimate reconstruction of their lives.”

Among the items from Straus’ collection that were selected for the exhibit: 

• The striped uniform of a Polish slave laborer who was imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp.
• A dollhouse that once belonged to (and was signed by) Holocaust survivor and renowned sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
• A trio of metal calipers stolen from a racial science hospital that had been used to  measure the width of a person’s skull, the length of their nose, and the shape of their chin.
• Details about a male survivor who fled to Shanghai — along with 20,000 other Jews — between 1933 and October 1941 and migrated post-war to the United States.

“This is not just a story about what caused the Holocaust — how did it happen?  how did people learn to hate their neighbors? — but also about resilience,” Brown says of the exhibit’s mission. “It’s a story about coming back, about reconstruction. And in that sense, we end the exhibit with a portion about the Nuremberg trials, about the liberation [of concentration camps], and about post-war migration.”

‘This is an amazing asset to our state’

When the exhibit opened in November, students from the History 749 course served as exhibit docents, leading twice weekly tours. However, when the spring semester brought changes to the students’ schedules, the docent chore fell to Straus.

It’s not an unfamiliar role, as she has been educating secondary school students about the Holocaust for several years, most recently through the nonprofit Nevada Center of Humanity, which she founded in 2023.

Straus’ wealth of knowledge about both the Holocaust and genocide wasn’t just acquired through her graduate program at Gratz College in Philadelphia, the oldest Judaical college in the U.S. and one that is regarded as the nation’s foremost academic authority on the Holocaust and genocide.

In fact, Straus has direct lineage to the atrocities committed during World War II.

“My father, who was a Las Vegas pioneer, is from a family of Jewish Polish immigrants,” Straus says. “Luckily, my grandmother had the foresight to come to this country before World War I. Unfortunately, her family did not. They were all murdered in Treblinka, one of the deadliest of the six Polish death camps.”

Hence, Straus’ collection is deeply personal. So, whether Straus is leading an exhibit tour at the governor’s office or educating the community through the Nevada Center for Humanity, her words and her artifacts carry enormous weight.

“I recently gave a tour of the exhibit to 25 community leaders, and their mouths were on the ground,” says Straus, who sketched the blueprint for the Nevada Center for Humanity while pursuing her master’s during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was profound. So I’m aware of the power of these artifacts. You can tell stories through them.”

Straus plans to continue telling those stories, long after she gives her final tour of “The Holocaust: Reconstructing Shattered Humanity” in mid-March.

Just when and where that will be is unclear. As Straus reiterates, protecting her artifacts must be the top priority. Of near equal importance: making sure her collection isn’t politicized in any way.

“The right place consists of high security and no political agenda,” she says of a future (and possible permanent) home for her collection. “Optimum would be a place where they can be seen by all segments of our society. Because this is an amazing asset in our state. These are primary source materials that belonged to people who survived World War II. So I have a duty to keep them safe from damage or theft, and there are a finite number of places that would pass the security test.”

Count Brown among the many who hope Straus succeeds in her quest to find the ideal permanent location — be it at UNLV or elsewhere — so residents of and visitors to Las Vegas can better appreciate the gravity of the Holocaust.

And also appreciate the thousands of non-Jews who during World War II courageously stood up for and safeguarded their fellow man — often at tremendous personal risk.

“It’s really important to understand not just the moral weight of genocide, but also understand resilience and overcoming and reconstruction, while also redefining what it means to be a survivor,” Brown says. “We now consider survivors not just people who were interned in concentration camps and didn’t die, but really anyone who was involved in resistance, involved in flight, involved in hiding in plain sight.”

At the campus level, Brown also is hopeful that UNLV’s involvement with “The Holocaust: Reconstructing Shattered Humanity” will serve as a positive step in the university’s quest to expand course offerings related to the Holocaust and genocide.

Toward that end, the university on Monday co-hosted an event with Hillel of Las Vegas, UNLV’s chapter of the national Jewish Student Union, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis’ largest death camp.

The event, which took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, included a candle lighting, governor’s proclamation and remarks from two prominent former UNLV students  — Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley and Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft.

There also was a roundtable discussion about the importance of studying what remains a relatively new area of history curricula.

“Just because it’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day doesn’t mean it’s the only day on the calendar where we can do Holocaust education or commemoration,” Brown says. “I’m hoping this will lead to an engaged discussion on its significance and lead students to see this as a living, organic, dynamic topic of study and of thought, and not just as a kind of moral absolute.”