The Immigrant Story and PLACE invite you to visit “I Lived to Tell the World,” a visual exhibition at PLACE Galleria, 735 NW 18th Ave, Portland. The exhibit, inspired by journalist Elizabeth Mehren’s award-winning book of the same name, celebrates the stories of men and women who have survived perilous journeys and unthinkable cruelty in their home countries, only to build productive new lives in Oregon.
These survivors are united by a troubling truth: Human despotism, barbarism, and cruelty sometimes know no bounds. And yet, as this exhibition aims to make clear, humanity is also made up of the courageous and the resilient. The Immigrant Story presents this exhibition in the hope that the images and their corresponding stories will inspire, inform and, possibly, enlighten.
The Immigrant Story is proud to join with lauded Portland photographer Jim Lommasson to display his work featuring objects that survivors were able to carry with them throughout their desperate journeys. Participants also shared handwritten testimonies — stories, memories, poems, drawings — about these objects. These personal reflections speak to the luminous inner life of these ordinary objects and to the anguish of remembering lives forever left behind. Ordinary objects thus become sacred.
I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War will run from July 9, 2025 through August 8, 2025.