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The film and photographic images that emerged from the Holocaust, often in a blurrily dark monochrome, instantly became the visual definition of evil in the 20th century. So to set this brutal iconography against the cheerily crisp colours of modern English suburban homes in springtime – complete with armchairs, French doors on to patios, bright tulips in pots – might risk accusations of superficiality, or worse.
But when the people in these apparently mundane locations are themselves survivors of the Holocaust, the sheer joyful fact of their existence becomes a triumphant rejoinder to the unimaginable cruelty and depravity of three-quarters of a century ago. The new images are collected together in Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, which opens later this week to coincide with world Holocaust day, at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) gallery in Bristol after a showing at the Imperial War Museum in London.
The exhibition was initially intended to run in 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, and plans were made to photograph the 70 or so Holocaust survivors living in the UK.
“Of course lockdown ensured that didn’t happen,” says the RPS project curator, Tracy Marshall-Grant. “Then in spring of last year, when things were looking a little more open, we tried again and it came together remarkably smoothly.”
Marshall-Grant has invited fellows of the RPS – as well as its patron the Duchess of Cambridge, who, in an unexpected juxtaposition, shares wall space with the Sun’s longtime royal photographer Arthur Edwards – to capture the survivors at their homes, often surrounded by their families. “There was no uniform brief,” says Marshall-Grant. “All the photographers know what they are doing so I just asked them to treat it as one of their own projects. The result is fascinatingly diverse. There are some very traditional portraits but also things that look like they are out of glossy magazines. And the photographers often became close to their subjects and kept in touch. Sian Bonnell’s picture of Tomi Komoly – someone simply in their garden wearing their good clothes – has such a warm and personal feel that you wouldn’t be surprised if it was a family picture.”
This family aspect cuts to the heart of the project. The survivors were young during the Holocaust and down the years have become parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. “Along with their families there have also been businesses and charity work and all the other elements of productive and useful lives,” says Marshall-Grant. “Here they are, products of the lives they have built. Of course the horrors of what they and so many others endured is always there, sometimes directly in these photographs in terms of personal effects from the time and so on. But ultimately it has been such a privilege to work with these people and with this material because what actually comes out of it is not only a sense of revulsion at what happened, but huge admiration and gratitude for the positive legacies that have been allowed to be passed on down the generations.”
Family snapshots: pictures and stories from the Generations exhibition
Sir Ben Helfgott (main picture, above) photographed by Frederic Aranda with his grandson Sam at his home in London, was born in Poland in 1929 and incarcerated in the Buchenwald and Theresienstadt concentration camps. After the war he came to the UK and became a weightlifter, representing Great Britain at the 1956 and 1960 Olympics. He was knighted in 2018 for his contribution to Holocaust education. “My experience may have hardened me, made me more realistic about human nature,” Helfgott has said, “but I was repelled by the evil I witnessed. I despaired but I did not let cruelty and injustice break my spirit.”
Dorothy Bohm (above) was living in Lithuania in 1939 when she was sent to the UK to escape the Nazis. She didn’t see her family again for 20 years. Bohm went on to become a leading photographer, was a co-founder of the Photographers’ Gallery and worked into her 90s. This was taken in her home in Hampstead where she talked to photographer Jillian Edelstein about her father. “Their separation during the war had been particularly painful,” says Edelstein. “We decided to use this photograph of him to commemorate that time and to have in the image, almost as a symbol of their survival.”
Tomi Komoly (above) lost many family members in the Holocaust. He came to the UK in 1956 as a refugee and had a long career in the chemical industry. Photographer Sian Bonnell wanted the image to share the “wisdom of his experience and his incredible strength”. In 2020 Komoly was awarded the British Empire Medal for his work telling the story of the Holocaust in schools, and his contribution to the fight against hate crime.
Eve Kanner-Kugler (above) left Germany with her mother after the anti-Jewish attacks of Kristallnacht in 1938. She arrived in New York in 1941 and moved to the UK in 1990. Jane Hilton’s triptych includes the lanyard Eve wore for the two-month journey by train and sea and the original manuscript of the book Eve wrote about her mother’s life, Shattered Crystals. The centre panel (above) shows Eve with her second cousin’s grandchildren.
Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is at the Royal Photographic Society Gallery, Bristol, from 27 January to 27 March.
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