Two words in the comment book summed it all up.

"A warning."

This grim and silent reminder echoed the larger message in an exhibit of photos from the Warsaw Ghetto. The exhibit, on loan from the Smithsonian Institution, will run until March 4 in the HUB Formal Gallery.

Before the Holocaust, there were 386,000 Jews in Warsaw. But the brutal German invasion and occupation of Poland brought tragedy most thought impossible.

After the fall of Poland, the Nazi conquerers began rounding up Jews. In Nov. 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off behind barbed wire and concrete.

By June, the Nazis had crammed almost 1.5 million Polish Jews into a 16 square block area.

A simple black band -- reminiscent of a mourning band -- wraps around the room; it brings a somber tone. The patrons of the exhibit whisper in hushed tones -- no one talks out loud.

The exhibit of 129 photos is painfully powerful. Shock and horror cross the faces of onlookers.

"People get quiet," said Ann Shields, head of the HUB and Kern Building art galleries. Shields said one woman even left the exhibit, saying to Shields that she couldn't talk about what she had seen.

But one German soldier's photos speak volumes about what he saw in the ghettos.

On Sept. 19, 1941, Heinz Jost, an off-duty German soldier, took 129 photos of everyday life behind the barbed wire and brick walls. He spared nothing as his camera captured the desperate eyes and hollow corpses of the doomed thousands.

Jost's photos teem with street vendors, burial carts, the naked stick-thin dead and the crush of humanity within Warsaw's walls.

He never brought the pictures to light until near his death when he turned them over to the German magazine Stern. Now they form this traveling exhibit.

Today, these photos surround onlookers, never letting them escape their message.

A young woman's eyes stare out of the first photo. They do not let onlookers escape her gaze. She is wearing a tattered dress; starvation shows in her dirt-smudged face. Nearby, black and white pedestrians walk unconcerned.

"It touched me," Shields said about the photo. "While we might not be experiencing the Holocaust, we still have vestiges -- Somalia, Bosnia, the homeless."

The graphic nature of the exhibit can evoke deep emotion.

"What's really gripping, what's really upsetting, is that this man really captured this period in history," said State College resident Margie Heyd.

Jost captured the horrifying aspects of ghetto life, Heyd said.

"It's the way the dead bodies were shuffled around, it's very dehumanizing," she said.

Before the deportations in 1942, 85,000 Jews died "natural deaths" from the starvation and epidemics that wracked the community.

Ten thousand ghetto residents were shot when the deportations began.

By the time silence fell on the ghetto again, the Germans had forced 265,000 Jews into the Treblinka concentration camp.

A documentary film plays in one end of the gallery. It captures the corpse of a child falling off a burial cart; an onlooker flinches and turns her eyes away.

"Every generation needs to be touched by this exhibit," Stein said. "Every group has had its genocide, and we need to see what we are doing to each other.

On April 19, 1943 German forces entered the ghetto to destroy it. Ten thousand Jews died resisting the German onslaught. On May 16, 1943 the ghetto was razed, leaving a culture and a people in its ashes.

Jost's photos remain.