We’re in the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London.
What we’re looking at here is a concrete tile that has recently gone on display.
It’s a small object that tells one part of the devastating history of the Holocaust.
So this is a tile or part of a tile from one of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp
it's most likely a wall tile and we know this from the limited survivor testimony
that's in existence that describes the colour of the wall and the floor tiles
in the gas chambers and the reason that i say limited testimony is that there were very few
survivors from the Treblinka death camp it was a camp designed specifically for mass murder
Between July 1942 and September 1943 approximately nine hundred thousand Jews and two thousand Roma
were murdered at the Treblinka death camp. To hide all traces of what had happened at Treblinka, the
Nazis demolished the camp and turned it into a farm. Because of this it had been assumed that
there was nothing left to find at Treblinka but in 2014 there was a large excavation
this tile was one of the artefacts found during this excavation so it's some of the only physical
evidence in existence that was once witness to what happened in the gas chambers at Treblinka.
The genocide now known as the Holocaust was the state-sponsored mass murder of six million Jewish
men, women and children. There was nothing inevitable about the decision of the Nazis
and their collaborators to attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and hundreds of thousands of people
were complicit. The Nazi regime came to power in 1933, which saw the spread of their insidious
ideas of racial ideology. Persecution and violence towards Jewish people living within the Reich
became sinister and overt. Jewish people were initially pressured to emigrate, and many escaped
from the Reich. But thousands were left behind. War was declared on 3 September 1939. The events
that followed eventually led to the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
It was in September 1939 when Warsaw first made front-page news
with horror and bewilderment fear and incredulity the world followed it.
The invasion of Poland and the start of the war in Europe provided circumstances for more extreme
behaviour from the Nazi regime. Their invasion and occupation tactics were brutal and ruthless.
Civilians were on the front line and were not spared. Nazism had become an explicitly
murderous regime. Germany’s territorial expansion also brought about a large increase in the number
of Jews under the control of the Reich. This led to the formation of the first ghettos.
When the Nazis first occupied Poland they knew that they wanted to try and address their
so-called Jewish problem this self-inventive problem of theirs but they weren't quite sure
about how to go about it so Heydrich sent out a schnellbrief to all of the Nazis going into
this territory which which laid out a kind of a principle that Jewish people should be centralised
into population centres and these places because were described as ghettos. So these are places
that Jews are forced to live they become massively overpopulated. Now at first ghettos are open so people
are able to leave and re-enter but over time most of them become sealed and once they become sealed
it means that levels of hardship amplify very quickly and ghettos become places of enormous
suffering. They have very little access to food very little access to medicine
and death rates start to climb, and some people are forced to live in these places for years on end.
We moved into the ghetto and we moved with my grandparents and at first the conditions anyway for us for the children didn't seem so threatening
but very quickly the conditions together became
worse and worse there was German soldiers and some Ukrainians and that fields just walking
around the streets of together and shooting people or beating them up they particularly
like to beat up old men especially men who had beards. There was so much hunger that very quickly
people began to die of hunger and i remember seeing children who i knew from
the school before with swollen bellies and then then they were outside that gates even
bodies put out because so many people died and people couldn't bury them.
The invasion of the Soviet Union was a turning point in the course of the war and the Holocaust.
As the Nazis occupied Soviet countries in the East, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands
of non-combatants that they considered ‘enemies’ within these territories.
As the German army advanced east into the soviet union in operation Barbarossa they are
followed by four units of Einsatzgruppen now these Einsatzgruppen answer to Heinrich Himmler head of
the SS and they're supposed to be a security unit protecting the advancing German line in practice
it's really about the Nazis racist ideology so Einsatzgruppen are given orders to shoot
any Jewish people in positions of authority within the soviet union it doesn't take long
for this to evolve to include all Jewish people so it only takes six weeks for the onset script
and to move from shooting military age men to shooting women and children this has nothing
to do with camps or gas chambers this is about brutal face-to-face killings in ditches in fields
in beaches in ravines in barns all across the occupied soviet union and the scale of this is
is vast. In Babi Yar for example over 32,000 people are shot in a matter of days so this is
when the Nazis whole policy towards Jews becomes unambiguously murderous.
By early 1942, annihilation of the Jews had become the formal policy of the Nazis. The confirmation
of the covert plan (Operation ‘Reinhard’) to ‘liquidate’ the 2 million Jews under Nazi
control in occupied-Poland was approved. This would begin with the deportation and murder
of those living in ghettos. The extermination of all Jewish people in Europe is the ultimate goal.
This requires immense logistical organisation and complicity not just from the Nazis,
but commercial companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals across occupied Europe.
The so-called Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, were the final destination of
approximately 1.75 million men, women and children. Located within occupied Poland,
they were designed to be discreet and efficient. People were told that they are being processed
for work ’in the east’, but will need to be showered before this procedure. The showers
were actually gas chambers that pumped carbon monoxide into the sealed rooms.
The process was brutal, barbaric and routinely inefficient.
Separate to the small number of extermination camps, was the concentration camp network.
This network has started in the early years of the regime to target all of those the Nazis considered
enemies of the state, including communists, Jehovah Witnesses, and homosexual men. The camp
network grew rapidly as the war developed and the Nazis need for additional labour to support
the crumbling war effort became increasingly acute. Auschwitz became a centre of this process
and by 1944 had become the focal point of both the mass murder and enslavement of Europe’s Jews.
Within the concentration camp system Jewish people were considered by the Nazis to have no worth
at all they were treated incredibly badly and and from the Germans point of view the ultimate aim
was still to ensure all Jewish people within Europe were murdered they just saw this as a
different way of killing them rather than killing them direct lamps they would work them to death so
they made them work on very very very meager rations in dreadful conditions in barracks
living with three or four or five people to a bunk infested with lice and they made them work
incredibly dangerous versions of hard labor in order to serve Germany's ailing war effort
this jacket belonged to Leibish Engelberg when he was a prisoner in the concentration camp system
Leibish survived several forced labor camps and numerous concentration camps
Leibish his wife Liber and two young sons David and Israel moved from Belgium to the
unoccupied zone of France thinking that they would be safer but in the summer of 1942
roundup of Jews particularly foreign Jews which the Engelbergs were
began and Leibish and his family were arrested on the 26th of august 1942
Leibish and his family which included his wife sons and brothers and their family were put on
convoy number 29. this convoy was one of those from France and the Netherlands that was stopped
at a town called causal on its way to Auschwitz here men between about the ages of 15 to 50
were selected for forced labour Leibish and his brother Joseph were likely selected the rest of
his family continued on to Auschwitz where they were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival.
Leibish and his brother Joseph actually remained together throughout the duration of the war
they were held together in several forced labour camps and then in concentration camps including
Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau and they were liberated from a sub-camp of Dachau in April
1945. this jacket was worn by Leibish within the concentration camp system and he kept this jacket
after liberation he actually kept it in a cupboard at his home but never spoke about his experiences
after his death his daughter Rita donated the jacket to imperial war museums so that we could
tell his story there were only 34 men of Leibish's entire transport of a thousand people who were
known to have survived until the end of the war. Leibish and his brother Joseph were among the 34.
As the Reich became encircled by the allies on all sides, the Germans became very aware that
the concentration camps on the edges of their territories were in the path of the advancing
armies. So they forced the few prisoners who are left alive to walk huge distances through
the winter back to Germany. These became known as the death marches. They were enormously dangerous.
If people couldn’t keep up they were shot, and many froze or starved to death.
They were also walking straight through towns and villages
and were hugely visible. About a third of the people on these death marches did not survive.
So from relatively early on the Germans are aware of the fact that the world might not see things
as they do and so from 1941 they begin efforts to cover the traces of their crimes but as the allies
close in on the right these efforts start to begin with an increased volume so the Germans seek to
raise any remaining sites to the ground if they're able to they seek to
destroy paperwork and they also become really aware that the prisoners themselves
are sources of testimony to potential allied investigators so they don't want any prisoners to
be found alive also because of the volume of this crime means that it's not possible to destroy all
of these traces so whilst a huge volume of it is destroyed a huge volume of it isn't as well
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 bad
that 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.
So as soon as the allies begin to liberate the few remaining concentration camps and
they find the people within them these people cease to be prisoners of the Nazis and become
displaced persons and these people have nowhere to go the homes that they had come from that they've
been forced out of or taken from aren't theirs anymore a lot of them don't want to go back to
the to the countries or the neighbourhoods and be surrounded by the people who are happy to see
them deported but also a lot of them don't have homes to go back to because the homes have been
taken from them or being destroyed and these DP camps become the homes of the people who
live within them for years some of them are in the sites of former concentration camps
others are not and they become places where people start to rebuild their lives and make
connections with the few people that they can find who are left alive but of course that's a massive
challenge for these individuals because what they'd experienced is is more than a lot of
people can bear and they know that whatever the years in front of them hold it's going to be
a very very very different reality to the one that they'd left before the second world war.
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 the
two met and were engaged within a week and they got married a few months later and this is the
dress that Gena was wearing. It's made of British parachute silk and made into a dress by a local
tailor. So Bergen-Belsen was liberated on the 15th of April 1945 and the conditions at that time were
catastrophic 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 to
face 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.
While accounts of survival help us to remember and give a human face
to a series of events that are so hard to comprehend, it is also important to
recognise that millions of people – the vast majority – were not able to escape or survive.
The Nazis were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews,
but the nevertheless , the Holocaust is overwhelmingly a history of loss.