THE OBJECTS OF LOVE
EXHIBITION
Presented by The Office of Public Works in association with Holocaust Awareness Ireland this poignant exhibition tells the fate of individual lives torn asunder in Nazi-occupied Poland and beyond.
Told through a curated collection of precious family objects, photographs and documents, powerful mementoes - which survived the Holocaust, Dublin based art dealer, Oliver Sears vividly brings to life this extreme edge of European history where his mother Monika and grandmother, Kryszia are the beating hearts of an epic and intimate story of love, loss, and survival.
Set against images of WWII, among the objects, photographs and documents are photographs of Oliver Sears’ mother, Monika aged 2 and a half in the Warsaw Ghetto, forged identity papers belonging to his grandmother Kryszia (née Edyta Rozenfeld) which allowed her to live outside the ghetto for periods of the war.
Pre-war photographs of the Rozenfelds, Oliver Sears’s grandparents, and their friends are among the hardest for him to look at. They depict life, love, community in their hometown of Łódź. A time that could not conceive of a plan to eradicate them industrially and to vaporize any trace of them. By any measure, these photographs represent a time of innocence.
Among the documents on view is a witness testimony from Yad Vashem and a cache of documents, recently unearthed by Oliver from the archive of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, including Pawel’s birth certificate, marriage certificate a sworn affidavit from Kryszia to a court in Łódź in 1946 explaining the fate of Pawel, her husband. How these documents fetched up in the USHHM remains a mystery.
Also on view is a gold powder compact. When Kryszia and Monika returned to Łódź after the war, it was still a very dangerous place for Jews so, in 1947, Kryszia took the decision that the family should leave. She sold her apartment for a fraction of its value, bought gold, the currency of the refugee, and had it made into a powder compact. His grandmother’s whole world had been distilled into one golden square of hope.
Speaking at the opening, director Lenny Abrahamson paid tribute to curator Oliver Sears for sharing his family's story and for making the Holocaust relevant to our present. Minister Patrick O’Donovan emphasized the obligation and responsibility to speak out against hate speech and bullying and to make sure that the failures and atrocities of the past are not repeated.
As Oliver Sears poignantly summarized the exhibition: "It is the telling of individual stories that shows you how precious are the lives of strangers and how collectively we must protect them. When I look at my family, I see love love, loss, defiance and triumph but above all I hear a song for justice."
Oliver Sears, together with his wife Catherine Punch have founded Holocaust Awareness Ireland, a new organization which aims to connect the Holocaust to contemporary culture and the politics of our times. Lenny Abrahamson and Bergen-Belsen survivor Tomi Reichental are among the advisors. Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost, The Search for 6 Million has appeared on their Talks and Events programme.
The Objects of Love exhibition is accompanied by an audio narration by Sears and an illustrated booklet. It is free and open daily until 13 February in Dublin Castle's Bedford Hall.
An exhibition entitled The Objects of Love by Oliver Sears is currently running at Dublin Castle in Ireland. It tells the story of his Jewish family before during and after the Second World War.
Olver Sears