(Berlin) A blonde doll, a hand-carved Torah scroll case, a piano: the Yad Vashem memorial is lending pieces by Holocaust survivors and victims for the first time for an exhibition in Berlin.
The sixteen heirlooms, one per German region, on loan from the Israeli Holocaust memorial are presented from Tuesday. A first in 70 years.
Lore Mayerfeld, 85, was just a child when her grandparents gave her the doll she describes as a “parting gift” as her Jewish family fled Kassel in central Germany, for the United States.
“The pajamas she is wearing are the ones I wore during Kristallnacht”, the pogrom of November 1938, explains Lore Mayerfeld to AFP.
“The hour” of Holocaust deniers
Mme Mayerfeld and her mother were able to join her father in the United States in 1941, but only learned after the war that her grandparents and several aunts, uncles, and cousins had been murdered by the Nazis.
Now living in Jerusalem, she says she never allowed her children to play with her Inge doll “because it’s breakable.”
The family eventually decided their place was at Yad Vashem. She made the trip to Germany for the exhibition, as long as she has the strength. “It’s a very moving trip, I kind of relive my story,” she says.
“The whole world has not learned the lesson (from the Holocaust) and that is very sad. There are those who deny that it even happened. After my generation, who will be there to tell the story? “, dreads Mme Meyerfeld.
For Yad Vashem President Dani Dayan, finding new ways to connect with younger generations is essential as the “post-survivor era” looms.
“I’m afraid this is the happy hour of Holocaust deniers, Holocaust distorters. This is why we must now prepare the ground to face it,” he said.
The Torah case was handcrafted in 1939 by Leon Cohen, a Jewish World War I veteran.
When he and his wife Adele and two children were sent to the Theresienstadt camp, Leon took his precious box with him. Before the whole family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Leon entrusted it to a friend, Henrietta Blum. If this one and the case survived, the Cohen family perished.
” Miracle ”
Another object of the exhibition: a piano belonging to the Margulies family, textile merchants from Chemnitz (East). Several of its members went into hiding when the Nazis tightened their grip, but they soon realized that fleeing was the only option.
They boarded a ship for Haifa in 1939 and eventually arrived in Palestine. Their beloved piano arrived a few days later in a shipping container, thanks to arrangements made by their fifteen-year-old son, Shlomo.
The family eventually donated them to Yad Vashem in gratitude for their survival. “With these objects, we begin to imagine how these people, who felt completely German, were slowly torn from the heart of society”, comments Ruth Ur, curator of the exhibition.
For her, the piano journey is a sort of “miracle” and part of a “new way of telling stories” about the Holocaust. “This boy (Shlomo) is still alive today at the age of 99. And it’s wonderful”.