Senior Conservator, Jenna Taylor installs a fish knife belonging to Mr and Mrs Schindler. Pictured in The Holocaust Gallery at IWM London, Lambeth Road.Photographed 30th Sept 2021
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.