A place to hide. A journey across a border. Someone willing to carry a possession that its owner could no longer safely keep. During the Holocaust, help could take many forms, and its consequences could be profound for the person offering it as well as the person seeking it.
From 1 to 29 October, Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield will host Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust. The travelling exhibition brings together accounts of rescuers and survivors from fifteen European countries, placing their experiences within the different conditions of war, occupation and persecution in which they unfolded.
And the context is critical. To speak of rescue is also to ask who needed it, what stood in its way, and why an offer of help in one place might have been impossible in another. The exhibition gives space to the people trying to survive as well as to those who assisted them.
Among its British connections is Eva Paddock, née Fleischmannová, who came from Czechoslovakia to Britain on a Kindertransport organised by Sir Nicholas Winton. It also tells the story of Ida and Louise Cook, two London sisters whose enthusiasm for opera helped them travel in Europe. They carried valuables for Jewish refugees across borders and later helped people establish lives in Britain. Yad Vashem recognised the sisters as Righteous Among the Nations in 1964.
For Holocaust Centre North, these international accounts meet a history it has spent years preserving. Based at the University of Huddersfield, the centre tells the history of the Holocaust through the experiences of survivors and refugees who came to the North of England. Its own exhibition and archive follow lives beyond escape and liberation, into the difficult work of making a home afterwards.
Hannah Randall, the centre’s Head of Education, says the new exhibition echoes its commitment to telling this history through personal stories. Some of the rescue efforts it documents, she notes, helped people who would become part of northern communities survive the Holocaust.
Between Life and Death was developed by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre in Berlin. First shown in Brussels in 2018, it has since travelled internationally. Its arrival in Huddersfield is an opportunity to encounter these histories close to the northern lives and families with which Holocaust Centre North works.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 1 October and runs until 29 October at Holocaust Centre North, University of Huddersfield.
The 5pm launch on 1 October is free, with advance booking required
Header image: 2022 Exhibition at the Museum and Memorial in Bełżec Poland. Photo by Przemyslaw Wawryca
