Everybody Had a Name

Everybody

Had a Name

by Jayne Josem CEO Sandy SaxonSenior Curator Fiona Kelmann Curatorial Assistant

Our new permanent Holocaust exhibition starts and ends with one person, Holocaust survivor Tuvia Lipson, but in between visitors will encounter thousands. Many of whom are connected with our own Melbourne survivor community. These are our stories. Together they form a collective history of the Holocaust, from a uniquely Melbourne perspective. This is to honour the survivors who migrated here, built a strong community from the ashes of the Holocaust, and were determined to inspire future generations to prevent such atrocities happening again. “Everybody had a name, nobody had a grave. We are talking about people not numbers.” Tuvia, a volunteer speaker for over two decades at Melbourne Holocaust Museum, would say to school children every week. He knew that the students could not comprehend 6 million, so he brought it back to his mother, his father, his sisters, his brother, his schoolmates, his playmates. It is Tuvia’s powerful message that has been one of the driving forces for the curatorial vision for our new permanent exhibition on the Holocaust. This exhibition presents an expansive and tragic history yet tries to connect visitors via countless artefacts and smaller stories. It constantly expands and contracts – zooming in to the personal stories and out to the larger context of the Holocaust. The exhibition begins with the section The World That Was, by setting the scene of this vibrant pre-war Jewish life, where visitors will encounter home movies, household objects, Judaica, and artworks. This painstakingly curated collection draws visitors to the small details of individual lives, affirming the philosophy that you cannot understand what was lost, until you understand what was. To explore the role of religion in Jewish life, and the synagogue as the centre of this, two significant artefacts have determined that our focus is on the town of Czestochowa in Poland. Len and Mark Fagenblat donated the parochet or torah curtain from the New Czestochowa Synagogue; an artefact their parents rescued post-war and brought to Australia. Survivor, Chaim Sztajer, made a model of the Old Synagogue in Czestochowa. Both synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis. Having set the scene, the next section - Rights Removed - follows the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party and the introduction of laws and policies aimed to exclude those they deem unworthy of citizenship in the Third Reich. We are collaborating with German artists Stih and Schnock on an artwork entitled ‘Evidence of Evil’ which graphically depicts the draconian antisemitic laws introduced from 1933 onwards. Where and how to escape is featured, including an interactive display exposing desperate letters from Jews in Germany to family in Australia. The story of William Cooper and the Aboriginal protest following Kristallnacht features here, as we invite the audience to consider what would they do when confronted with injustice happening across the globe? How remarkable it was to have these Australians take a stand, when most were indifferent. The next section - Freedoms Lost- provides insight into the labelling, ghettoization and incarceration

Render of the entrance to the permanent exhibition of Jews – who became slave labour for the Nazi war machine. We identified around 16 photographs in our collection featuring images of Melbourne survivors inside ghettos, intimate photos of them wearing the detested armbands in everyday settings. These stand out as almost all the photos that exist from this period were taken by the Nazis with a perpetrator gaze – dehumanizing images of starving prisoners. We also display material buried by Lodz Ghetto friends, Bono Wiener and Abram Goldberg, as an act of defiance and testimony. These documents are further evidence of evil and deceit. Camp uniforms and other rare objects made in camps provide glimpses into both the inhumane conditions of the camps, as well as the dignity of the inmates. Life Unworthy of Life is both the most challenging and the most important section, revealing the tragic ‘Holocaust by Bullets’ campaign as well as mass murder in death camps. A series of letters from victim Sevek Buch to his wife and baby son, humanise the tragedy. Sevek was writing of the cruel conditions in the labour camp, letters which end after one of the deadliest mass killing sprees of the war, known as ‘Erntefest’, in and around Lublin, where Sevek was incarcerated. These letters were donated by his son, survivor Henry Buch, who will never know exactly how or where his father was murdered. Chaim Sztajer’s large scale model of the Treblinka death camp is the main exhibit in this section, depicting the grotesque process of mass murder in such camps. The model has undergone extensive conservation work ahead of its return to our new building. A moving display honours the special place of children as victims of the Nazi mass murder policy, with 1.5 million children murdered.

Survival Against the Odds turns the focus to stories of those that survived in hiding as well as those that resisted and tried to fight back. The story of survivor Ruth Kneppel’s work in the French resistance is a wonderful example. The diary written by Yitzhak Meir Kluska while hiding underneath a chimney hearth in a confined space with sixothers is a powerful artefact which dramatically underscores the challenge of trying to survive in hiding. The moment of liberation is followed by immense efforts by survivors to find loved ones, grieve for those murdered, and re-establish themselves in the wake of the Holocaust. This leads into the final section of the exhibition - Return to Life - starting with Displaced Persons camps and ending with the migration of survivors to Australia where they made a mark on Melbournewhile managing ongoing grief and trauma. Moral dilemmas are presented throughout the exhibition, directly and indirectly. Our hope is that visitors leave wondering: knowing what I now know, what is my responsibility in the world today?

This exhibition presents an expansive and tragic history yet tries to connect visitors via countless artefacts and smaller stories. It constantly expands and contracts – zooming in to the personal stories and out to the larger context of the Holocaust.

Museum Floorplan

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1. The World that Was 2. Rights Removed 3. Freedoms Lost 4. Life Unworthy of Life 5. Survival Against the Odds 6. Return to life