Holocaust Centre North unveils three new digital galleries
Online archive broadens access to materials relating to Holocaust survivors and refugees who made new lives in the north of England
Treasured family heirlooms, personal letters and cherished photographs are at the heart of a new online collection made accessible by the Holocaust educational centre in west Yorkshire.
Holocaust Centre North is enabling people to explore parts of its rich archive remotely for the first time via a searchable browser. Three years in the making, it features three new curated digital image galleries, designed to guide visitors through themed selections of digitised photographs, documents, and artefacts.
Together they reveal powerful true stories and histories of Holocaust survivors and refugees who made new lives in the north of England, including Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield, Liverpool, Hull and Bradford.
Free to all, the collection has been expanded from 6,000 to over 21,000 unique items of documentary evidence, including letters, photographs, and documents.
Among the highlights is a substantial collection from the Bradford Hostel for Jewish refugees which offered a lifeline to more than two dozen young refugees — twenty-four teenage boys and one girl — who escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria during the war.
For the second new digital gallery, images of precious objects such as cushions, board games, Seder Plates, and homemade childhood toys all brought over by survivors and bequeathed to the Centre by their families for safekeeping and posterity, are now also available to view online
Family heirlooms on display include a pair of gloves recently donated to the Centre by Lesley Schatzberger, originally belonging to her grandfather and brought over by her father’s cousin from Vienna.
The new Child Refugee image gallery features personal stories from children who fled persecution, including the Schrötter family who spent some time in Albania before immigrating to the UK.
Mother Hedwig, father Siegfried, and son Eric left Germany and travelled via Italy to Albania where they lived in a Jewish commune near the beach at Durrës from March – August 1939. They were sponsored by Leeds businessman Philip Boyle to immigrate to England, arriving in August 1939. The picture now included in the gallery is Eric as a young boy on the beach with several other refugee children (1939).
Now, anyone with an interest in Holocaust history, including academics, artists, schools, community groups, students, creative practitioners, researchers, and survivor families around the world, can remotely explore these new digital galleries.
Holocaust Centre North Archivist Hari Jonkers said: “This launch is just the beginning, and we will be gradually adding more themed galleries as we continue the vital work of cataloguing and digitising our collections. Digitisation allows us to protect and safeguard our rare and fragile original materials, whilst opening up access so that many more people can find out about the compelling family stories and collections we look after. It is a huge achievement for us as a Holocaust Centre in the North of England, one I am very proud of.”
- The three new digital galleries can be accessed here.
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