JB] Yeah, I mean exactly right. I think, you know, what's really important from the outset is to be absolutely clear about the fact that we're not talking about hierarchies of suffering, and we're not levelling up one group's experiences (or group of individuals’ experiences) against another, that's absolutely critical. But nevertheless, it's also really important to be clear about Nazi intentions and the Nazis persecuted lots of different people, and groups of people, for different reasons. As part of that whole network of persecution, they identified Jewish people eventually for total annihilation. And that is something which is discreet from other different vectors of persecution within Nazism, so we need to talk about the specificity of that. And the word ‘Holocaust’ is the most useful shorthand that we have culturally. And of course there are others, but nevertheless the word Holocaust has become so sort of centralized in western cultural memory, or certainly in this country, that it's the most useful shorthand we have to describe it. But it's really important that we don't allow that to become a kind of a shorthand for all Nazi persecution, because that doesn't help anybody. That doesn't help any of any of us to understand the specificities of who the Nazis were persecuting, and why they were doing it. So within the whole spectrum of Nazi persecution, we could talk about the Holocaust as referring specifically to the planned or attempted annihilation of Europe's Jews. The camps were liberated from July 1944, and footage of the scenes that Allied soldiers encountered were witnessed across the world. The conditions are so badthat many prisoners continued to die after liberation due to malnutrition and disease. For those prisoners that did survive, liberation was not the end of their suffering. The Holocaust areas alone contain some 2,000 objects and 4,000 images. Mr Bulgin said the museum team had wanted to accurately depict “the massive diversity and plurality of Jewish life pre-war”. And also to show what it means to be persecuted — and to persecute — and to demonstrate that the Nazi atrocities were “done by people to people”. The new galleries explore three core themes of persecution, looking at the global situation at the end of the First World War; escalation, identifying how violence towards Jewish people and communities developed through the 1930s; and annihilation, examining how Nazi policy crosses the threshold into wide-scale state-sponsored murder in the heart of twentieth century Europe.

How the Holocaust Began, review: a chilling reminder that the

In one of innumerable chilling insights into the Nazi mindset, on show is the callous Juden Raus (Jews Out), promoted as a “thoroughly enjoyable party game”, whose goal was to round up Jews for deportation to Palestine. Every line has a comic payoff and every character, from the leads down to the supporting players, is well-written. This may be a sect but everything is recognisable: David’s rivalry with church elders Kadiff Kirwan and Arsher Ali, one of the funniest things here, could just as easily happen in the office or at the golf club. And there are truths about family and friends that make it seem like more than a throwaway sitcom.” And I suppose, I would say that's why coming to, you know, the galleries can be a really useful part of that, because I can explain that to you, and I can kind of conceptualize a little, and to a certain extent intellectualize it, but being in the space you experience it. You don't experience what the people who made it experienced, but the experience of standing in the space and seeing this thing has a sort of an immediacy, and a kind of an affective resonance which is not replicable in anything else that we do. It's why people come to galleries, because we still they're not experiences anymore, you know, we don't talk about, we don't talk about the idea that you retake the steps of somebody in these moments in time, because you don't, you can't do that, that's an absurd claim to make. But nevertheless, they are experiential spaces; we feel in them and by feeling, our responses to the content around us changes, and we think about things differently. And thinking about things differently and dynamically is so critical in terms of advancing our knowledge and our understanding. So that's what we try to do in the galleries, and I think that just appreciating that, appreciating that none of these things will ever provide a completely total version of this, and even just that simple fact is really, you know, just being clear about that with students and everybody. To say nobody, even you know the world's leading scholars, nobody has read everything, nobody knows everything, nobody can even hope to get anywhere near that, but that's okay.

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Visitors to the galleries don’t meet Anita again until much later, when her experiences of Auschwitz-Birkenau are told in the section about slave labour in concentration camps. Anita’s story is told through her red jumper. Students that chose Anita’s story in the first room of the galleries are directed to find her jumper. They learn that Anita was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 18, where she was recruited into the women’s orchestra at the camp as the cellist. She was forced to play upbeat marches as prisoners walked in procession to and from work and for the SS. Anita’s role in the orchestra meant that she was given extra bread. She exchanged some of this bread for the jumper now on display and wore it both day and night to protect herself against the harsh winter – hidden underneath her camp uniform. She continued to wear it in Bergen-Belsen from where she was liberated in April 1945. LW: "So what we have here is the wedding dress worn by Gena Goldfinger on her wedding day to Norman Turgel in October 1945, and what's so special about this dress, about this story, is that Gena and Norman met when Norman entered Belsen concentration camp upon its liberation, and thetwo met and were engaged within a week, and they got married a few months later, and this is thedress that Gena was wearing. It's made of British parachute silk and made into a dress by a localtailor. So Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945 and the conditions at that time werecatastrophic, it was in a state of absolute chaos. The British soldiers upon arrival found almost 60,000 prisoners so it's severely overcrowded, and typhus was running rampant throughout the camp.This wedding dress tells the story of Gena who survived the Holocaust. She was forced toface a future and rebuild her life, but it was a future that she had to face without her family, the majority of whom didn't survive, without a home to go to and without any possessions."

How the Holocaust Began | Imperial War Museums

I want the coming generation to remember our times,” it reads. “I don’t know my fate. I don’t know if I will be able to tell you what happened later.” The Imperial War MusThe galleries – due to open in the autumn and with a fundraising appeal still running – will be brightly lit. Most such exhibitions are dimly lit because the subject is dark. “But that suggests it happened in the shadows, that nobody really knew about it, and the only way we can response to it is through silence. We think that is problematic. Because it happened in daylight, and it happened over a vast, vast landscape,” Bulgin added.