An Inhuman Catastrophe: The Holocaust Exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum (2017)

 

Roma and Sinti Gypsies in Radom, Central Poland.

     I have read a great deal about the Nazi period and I have seen a lot of documentary film footage about this evil. But I was completely shocked and surprised by my emotional reaction to the exhibition about the Holocaust, at London’s Imperial War Museum.
     The exhibition is staged across eight or nine rooms on the fourth floor of the building. It is, appropriately, dimly lit. It consists of photographs, film footage, objects and audio recordings of survivors.
     In the first room there are films of happy, prosperous Jews in Germany in the years before the war: here they are in parks, at functions, in family groups. They are laughing and touching and kissing and hugging and eating and drinking and having the time of their lives. All this was to change, of course.
     In the next room we see images of the pathetic moustachioed Austrian, the failed artist, just released from prison for plotting to overthrow the government. His time had now arrived. His day had dawned. He spoke well. The people listened. They were ready for the lies.
     It was in the next room, as I looked at the photographs in the cabinets, that I was completely overcome with a sudden burst of grief. I read the caption under the image of a smiling, chubby Jewish boy of five-or-six. His parents had been sent to a camp. He was rescued and taken in by an aunt. But soldiers ‘collected’ him, and he was marched into a forest with the rest of the town’s Jewish children, and they were all shot. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I could not suppress a sob.
     I moved on to the next photograph: a girl around 13 years old. It was more of the same. Another photograph: another little boy. Another… and another.  I wiped my eyes, which were now streaming, and sniffed, loudly, in the darkened room. I was aware of a woman who had crossed the room towards me, holding something white in her outstretched hand. I was reminded of a flag of surrender, but when I turned to face her I saw it was a tissue.
      “Here you are”, she said, “I was the same when I saw those.”
      I thanked her as best as I was able through my tears and she walked off. By the time I had moved into the next room the tissue was sodden, useless against the rest to come.
     On the wall in the next room was printed the failed artist’s edict about the march into Poland. It was essential, he had said, that each and every Polish man, woman and child should be wiped out in order for Germany to have the room it needed to further itself in the Golden Age of the Third Reich.
     And here we were now in the Polish room. The Warsaw ghetto was presented across the photographs. Audio was piped down on us from the ceiling. An elderly woman – a Polish Jew - was telling her childhood memory of the thugs who had rounded her up in the town square along with the other orthodox Jews. How the thugs all laughed at the beards and ringlets. All at once, the thugs yelled to the non-Jewish Poles in the houses flanking the square to throw out their scissors. All the shutters flew open in the buildings and the inhabitants began to fling their scissors into the streets. The thugs picked them up and began to roughly cut off the beards and ringlets. Those thugs unable to find scissors simply ripped hanks of hair from men’s chins or from the heads of the children. The disembodied woman’s voice was even now quavering with the horrific memory.
  “I thought, what are they doing!? We are just children!”
     In the next room were the shoes. Hundreds of shoes piled into a glass cabinet. Discoloured by age, or dirt, or ash, they lay atop each other. Some were cheaply made. Some were clearly expensive. Some were plain. Some had decorative stitching. Men’s, women’s and children’s shoes. Children’s shoes with their little shoelaces and buttons. I was now wracked with sobs which I no longer cared to stifle or hide. My eyes were streaming with tears, which I wiped away with clumsy, useless hands. Some others were also crying in that darkened room, I heard them sniffling.
     And here, now, was the display of the precious possessions that inmates of the concentration camps had managed to cling onto in their desperate desire to remain human. There were tin cups and plates. There were hundreds of buttons. There were many wire spectacles frames, sans glass. There were forks, often twisted into odd, but obviously useful shapes. There were hundreds of small pieces of glass, saved as cutting implements.
     And here, now, were the postcards and letters sent by Jewish children, safely evacuated to England or elsewhere, to parents who would never read them; parents who had been turned to ash and smoke, almost immediately upon entering through the gates of one or other of the camps.
     ‘Dearest Daddy, I long for you to come to us.’ ‘Mother, I wish to see you again.’ Even as I write this, hours later, my tears fall once again. By what right were those children so deprived? On whose whim were their lives torn apart. ‘Daddy, here is a drawing of the nice horses I saw today. Please visit if you can.’
     A fat, discoloured canister of Zyklon B sat at eye-level behind glass. I looked at the label. Somebody had designed it, with its death’s head skull. Someone had written and printed the information and instructions on it. Who was that anonymous person? What did they think it was going to be used for?
     And here, now, were the actual cudgels that had been wielded by those big, brave commandants and brawny capos. There is a thick wooden club with nails sticking out, all around the end. There is a metal pole with a slight bend in it from where it has struck human bodies. There is a short metal rod, no more than a bolt, really, with a nut on the end. They are nightmare implements. They were used against human beings. They were used to beat men and women. They were used to beat children.
     The voice of Goebbels drifts through the next room. And there he is, in close up, projected onto the wall. His maniacal, black eyes dart wildly across the audience as the twisted rhetoric rolls out of his enormous mouth. The regime trumpeted the arrival of the wrong set - the socially inadequate; the failed artist; the club-footed goblin; the obese pervert; the thugs and the sadists. Their time had come, and they were going to rub everyone’s noses in it. All their times had come.
     In the last room was an enormous scale model of Auschwitz concentration camp, all in white, with tiny, white, model figures herded along white pathways. A white train enters the white main gateway: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ is written above the white gate. Rows of white, flat buildings stretch along one side of the white compound. At the far end of the construction, all in white, is the large farmhouse which had been converted into the crematorium. A tall white chimney rises from the building. More little white figures, clustered together, are being herded towards its doorway.
     I leave the exhibition, tears still rolling down. I try to stifle them, but I find myself thinking of my daughter and my son and my granddaughter and it only makes it much worse.