We earnestly hope you accept the following invitation.

Beginning in October, Cincinnati Museum Center and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center located in Union Terminal will host “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” This traveling exhibition about the largest complex of extermination, concentration, and forced labor camps in the Holocaust includes over 500 original artifacts from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and institutions around the world. 

Cincinnati is one of a select few North American host cities. We are incredibly fortunate not only to have CMC and HHC as institutions of action and remembrance, but that they partnered to bring this powerful exhibition here. This is a rare opportunity to connect with Auschwitz as part of the larger Holocaust in which Nazis and local collaborators and opportunists murdered six million Jews across Europe, traumatized and enslaved so many more, and destroyed communities forever.

The CBA is honored to partner with HHC to provide a tour of the exhibition and an accompanying CLE on October 30.  See page 15 or visit cincybar.org to register

Our speaker will be Fred Miller, an attorney who practiced mainly in Butler County where he was also a magistrate. Fred’s parents were Dr. Albert and Jane Miller, both Holocaust survivors. His mother and her family fled Vienna just before WWII, when she was thirteen. His father grew up in Berlin during prewar Nazi Germany. Dr. Miller and his family fled right before the war, at age sixteen. He became a Ritchie Boy, part of an American military intelligence unit in which native-speaking German Jews interrogated prisoners and suspected war criminals. The Millers have been very active with HHC. Fred speaks and provides tours of the museum. He is eager to share his father’s story with us. 

This event is a special occasion. We hope you will attend on that basis alone. Few bar associations offer such an opportunity. 

But consider also the lessons of history in relation to our sworn oath to follow the law, respect courts, and act ethically and professionally. Dr. Miller often said, “The Holocaust didn’t start with bullets. It started with words.” The Holocaust embodies corruption; of lawyers and courts, the rule of just laws, and due process. These conditions built gradually from misinformation and the degradation of human beings and their protective institutions. The path is not hard to follow from incendiary rhetoric to consolidation of autocratic power, merging the justice system with the state, accepting Jewish isolation and exclusion as reflected in the Nuremberg Race Laws, concentration camps for political prisoners and undesirables, mob violence, and, ultimately, systematic extermination on a brutal scale as exemplified at Auschwitz.     

The objective “actual past” is inescapable. How we deal with that past impacts the law profoundly going forward. That is why HHC encourages people to stand up for themselves and others as a hopeful, enduring lesson of the Holocaust. And that is why the CBA emphasizes public education to promote understanding of law and courts, community service and racial justice that value the worth of our entire community, and respectful interaction. Learning from history is not always enough to avoid repeating its tragedies, but failing to make the effort only makes their repeat more likely.     

Alan Abes is a partner at Dinsmore and the 2025-2026 CBA president.