View of the new Holocaust Galleries at IWM London, opening 20th October 2021.
“Kristallnacht”, the notorious Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, but rather “the November pogroms”, to remind us that it wasn’t just property which was destroyed on November 9 and 10 1938 — 90 people were killed in the rioting.
We begin — and, bearing in mind that many of the visitors will be schoolchildren aged 14 plus — in the most heartwarming way, showing Jewish families enjoying their lives before the war. Here are thousands of ever-changing pictures and films of Orthodox and secular Jews in central Europe, laughing and messing about in boats, or like Graziella Falco from Milan, celebrating her bat mitzvah. There are football matches, swimmer and ski-ers, musicians, people shopping or strolling by a beach. In other words, you and me; people going about their daily lives with not a hint of the catastrophe waiting in the wings.
And simultaneously we are introduced to the theme of “totems” — life-size figures whose pictures appear throughout the exhibition, enabling us to meet them eye-to-eye. It is a striking thing to do and is at its most chilling in a display showing the most senior Nazis, those closest to Hitler. Here, life-size, is Goebbels, with Goring and Himmler close by. It’s a genuinely frightening moment.
Some of the material has been lent to the IWM by Yad Vashem and the Wiener Library. Those familiar with the latter’s singular collection of Nazi “board games” will be unsurprised to see its loan of the repulsive game, “Juden Raus” or “Jews Out”, in which players had to collect a Jewish figure and dispatch him or her to Palestine. “Even senior Nazis thought this was too much”, a curator says. “They thought it trivialised their serious message about Jews.”
By 1936 Hitler was triumphantly staging that year’s Olympic Games in Berlin. But just 25 miles away, construction was underway for the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Up until Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the IWM curators believe that the Holocaust was not inevitable. But as the tide of war began to turn against the Axis powers, the frenzy to kill Europe’s Jews grew and grew, first with their walling up in ghettos and then with their transport by train to the death camps.
And the cries of the victims — and those about to become victims — are louder on the walls of the exhibition. One man writes: “Shall we go? and if so, how?” Herta Nathorff, a paediatrician, says bitterly: “Father says he didn’t want to sell the company. The name — it should go under, with us”.
One of the most remarkable things on show is part of the Oneg Shabbat archive, a metal box containing painstakingly assembled contemporary witness statements and documentation, organised by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto. There were three main parts of this archive. In the first and the second, documents were stored in 10 such metal boxes and two giant milk churns. They contained material showing that Jews in the ghettos were aware of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, the troops carrying out mass shootings of Jews in other parts of Europe. Two of the Oneg Shabbat collection were dug up post-war from their burial sites; a third, of documents also hidden in milk churns. is believed to be buried today under the Chinese embassy in Warsaw, and has never been recovered.
Of all the thousands of images in this extraordinary permanent exhibition, a curator says that one picture is seared in her mind. “It’s a young woman holding a baby. It’s the last moments of their lives. She’s waiting to be shot. I can’t forget that picture”. She doesn’t say so because she doesn’t need to: it could have been any one of us.
The IWM permanent Holocaust and Second World War galleries open to the public on October 20, admission free. The museum is publishing a new book of untold personal stories, The Holocaust, by IWM historian James Bulgin, on the same date. Personal stories also feature in an illustrated history of the Second World War, Total War, A People’s History, by Kate Clements, Paul Cornish and Vikki Hawkins, published in partnership with the IWM.