JERUSALEM — A woman came to Yad Vashem to donate what was left of her mother — her eyeglasses.
“This woman told us that after she and her mother walked the selection ramp together at Auschwitz and before they were separated, her mother, who couldn’t see well without glasses, left them in her daughter’s care,” says Haviva Peled-Carmeli, director of artifact retrieval.
“They didn’t see each other again. The daughter kept the glasses safely, even though it was forbidden to keep personal belongings,” says Peled-Carmeli.
When she was finally ready to let go, she gave the glasses to Yad Vashem — the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.
From small personal items to larger collections, the Jerusalem-based museum created in 1953 continually receives donations relinquished by Holocaust survivors or discovered in former concentration camps or European communities. It is the largest holocaust museum in the world, receiving an average of 2 million visitors a year.
These small personal items that survived the fires of the Holocaust and have been donated to the museum are all that remain of lost lives.
These small pieces represent the silent testimony of millions of voices no longer heard. The museum has increasingly focused its effort on the collection of just such items.
To keep alive the stories of those who perished in the Holocaust and of those who are still alive to give their testimonies, Yad Vashem is constructing a new museum complex on its 45-acre site under a master plan called Yad Vashem 2001.
The complex, due to be finished in 2003, will include a new modernized museum three times bigger than the current one. It will display historical exhibits employing pictures, texts, multimedia and personal objects.
A second building in the complex will display the world’s most extensive collection of Holocaust art. Other components will include space for a synagogue, exhibition pavilion, the Hall of Names and a Learning Center.
A new archive and library already opened on the museum grounds in March 2000 houses more than 55 million documents, 130,000 photographs, thousands of video cassettes, 80,000 titles of books and several thousand journals.
By the end of the year the new entrance plaza and visitors’ center building will be ready to serve as a gathering and guidance point for visitors.
Peled-Carmeli says the new museum will have a ramp, just like the one at Auschwitz, and at the end of the ramp the glasses will be shown alone.
Among the permanent exhibitions in the new museum will be items received by Yad Vashem only this spring from the Chelmno extermination camp, located 47 miles west of Lodz, Poland. The shipment of bottles, cutlery and jewelry was found during a recent archaeological dig at the site and brought to Yad Vashem with the help of archaeologists and Carmeli.
Knowing they were losing the war at the end of 1944, the Nazis tried to erase the signs of their massive crimes against humanity by bombing the camp in which more than 320,000 Jews lost their lives. On the eve of the Russian army’s arrival, only a small number of Jews were still alive, under orders to help clean up the camp. When the task was done, the small band of inmates was shot by the Nazis. Only three managed to escape.
Until this find, it was believed that almost all the inmates’ personal belongings were destroyed.
“We discovered at least 570 belongings,” says Peled-Carmeli. “They were hidden in the ground. We found lots of items such as keys, Judaica artifacts, buttons and sewing tools.”
In most cases these personal items are the only things left to tell the story of the Holocaust victims.