Wiener Library exhibition to tell lesser-known stories from Belsen
Items on display in London to include bowls, smuggled diaries and photos of Soviet prisoners of war posted through the letterbox of a family living near the camp
An exhibition opening next month at the Wiener Holocaust Library will mark 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen.
Traces of Belsen will reveal the lesser-known stories of the camp, a site of the forced labour and murder of 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war, a place where the SS (Schutzstaffel) planned to hold ‘exchange Jews’ for swaps with German nationals, goods or currency, and which later served as a displaced persons camp.
The horrors witnessed by the British Army, eight decades ago as they liberated the camps at Belsen were shocking; they found tens of thousands of unburied bodies, the dead lying amongst the dying, disease and chaos.
The items on display in the exhibition are part of the scant evidence remaining from the camp. The SS stopped keeping records of the concentration camp towards the end of the war and destroyed what was remaining. The British burnt much of the camp to eradicate disease.
The photographs, documents and artefacts on show include photographs of Soviet prisoners of war posted through the letterbox of a family living close to the camp in 1942; a diary clandestinely smuggled into the camp by the daughter of the Wiener Holocaust Library’s founder, Dr Alfred Wiener; sketches from memory by a Jewish survivor and harrowing paintings by British soldier and artist, Eric Taylor.
Survivors of the camps gave testimonies to Wiener Library researchers in the 1950s, including Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz. Her account, on display in this exhibition, reveals the deteriorating conditions in the camp as around her the numbers of dead kept growing.
Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
The exhibition also features the photograph albums of aid workers, surviving items from those who rebuilt their lives in the DP camps after the war and everyday objects uncovered by archeologists.
Curator Dr Barbara Warnock said ‘Traces of Belsen “showcases documents, artefacts and photographs from the Wiener Library’s archives and elsewhere that can help to tell the complex story of the camps at Bergen-Belsen. Photographs of the brutally treated Soviet Prisoners of War, whose story is often overlooked, help to remind us of the 50,000 who died in Belsen and in nearby camps.”
The Library’s director, Dr. Toby Simpson adds that the exhibition “takes a fresh look at a subject that many of us think we are familiar with, because of the images of overwhelming death and suffering that were broadcast to the world in April 1945.
“The more we look at the evidence that remains, however, the more we can see that the catastrophic conditions in Belsen during the last months of the war, which so appalled the camps liberators and the wider world, produced shocking impressions which tend to obscure as much as they reveal.”
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