Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors

Moving exhibition at the Imperial War Museum of new portrait photographs of Holocaust survivors.

Organised with the Royal Photographic Society this show simply showed the photographs with a short biography of the sitter. Many of the survivors were shown with their family and the labels often listed how many children and grandchildren they had which seemed to emphasis their survival but also to point to family they had lost. The stories were all so monumental, to look at a dignified old lady and to read “By the aged of nine she was a slave labourer”.

It was touching to realise how many of them had been very small children often brought out of Nazi occupied countries via the Kindertransport anyone who had experienced the camps are now very old.  It won’t be long before there are no direct survivors left.

The pictures were arranged by photographer and a lot of the press coverage has centred around the fact that the Duchess of Cambridge has two pictures in the show which are Vermeer like in style and the sitters hold objects of sentimental value to them. I loved the video portraits at the end by Simon Roberts where the survivors sit quietly while their family talk about them and then finally enter the picture.

I picked Iby Knill as my photograph. Born in 1923 she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and selected for forced labour. She was liberated in 1945 while on a death march.

Closes 7 January 2022

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