Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem

Toy boat sent from the Pithiviers camp to 10-year-old Jean Pojzman in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. Jean, his mother Esther and sister Rachel were sent to the Drancy detention camp. On 21 August 1942, all three of them were deported to Auschwitz on Convoy #22, and murdered.

Holocaust survivor, photographer Arie Ben Menachem, 1947, Kibbutz Nitzanim, Erez Israel (Mandatory Palestine). From a collection photographed by Arie Ben Menachem after his immigration to Mandatory Palestine and before the establishment of the State of Israel.

Arie Ben Menachem (Prinz) was born in Lodz in 1922. During the war he assisted photographer Mendel Grossman in his clandestine efforts to document life in the Lodz ghetto. They photographed scenes of daily life – people at work, hungry children, the abuse, the executions and the deportations - and Arie used some of the images to create a unique personal 18-page album. When the ghetto was liquidated, Arie ended up in concentration camps in Poland and Germany, and his album was smuggled away. Although he was unable to determine the fate of the original album, copies of the individual sheets, published in various books, reached him after the war, and he managed to reconstruct the entire work.

His extensive personal library contained thousands of books on the Holocaust in general, and on the Lodz ghetto in particular. He was always willing to share his library and his vast personal knowledge with researchers and students. With his friend Yosef Rav, he translated and annotated the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle (Yad Vashem, 1986-1989), a unique and highly important research source. He also helped prepare a book on the Righteous Among the Nations in Poland. Arie Ben Menachem passed away in July 2006.

First steps, First words
Recorded in the hope that a family would be reunited.

In the summer of 1942, when deportation orders started to be issued in the Netherlands, Eliyahu and Betty Pakter found a hiding place for their baby son with the help of the Dutch resistance. Abraham was just three months old when he was entrusted to Maria and Frans Pakker, a childless Dutch couple from the city of Almelo.

In order not to arouse suspicion, the Pakkers changed Abraham's name to Wim, and he grew up in their house as their biological son. Feeling Betty's pain at having to part from her son, Maria started to document Wim's progress in a notebook: his first steps, first words, childhood illnesses, in the hope that one day he would be returned to his parents and these pages would help bridge the gaps.

After the war, when Abraham was reunited with his parents who had survived in another hiding place, the Pakkers gave Eliyahu and Betty the diary. About one year before the liberation Maria and Frans had a child of their own, and while they had tried not to become too attached to Wim, the parting proved very challenging for Maria.

In 2009, Maria and Frans Pakker were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

During the Holocaust, women recognized as Righteous Among the Nations risked their lives to provide Jewish children with physical shelter, accompanied by warmth and maternal care. At the end of the war, Jewish women took orphaned children under their wing, serving as mother figures and guiding them through their physical and psychological rehabilitation.

Their stories are here: https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/motherhood/adoptive-mothers

Yad Vashem Documents Archive
Moshal Repository, O.33/10683

These harrowing photos taken by Mendel Grossman in August 1944 show Jews in Lodz ghetto prior to their deportation to Auschwitz.

The pictures are amongst the thousands of secret photographs taken by Grossman in the ghetto. He was deported to the Koenigs Wusterhausen labor camp and stayed there until 16 April 1945. Ill and exhausted, he was shot by N***s during a death march, still holding on to his camera.

"Displaying the authentic artifacts in a history museum, certainly in Yad Vashem, clearly has inestimable value. They are the remnants of memory and evidence that allow the museum to show visitors the authentic story at its greatest intensity. Each item possesses its own human story. Each object is attributed, through credits, to the specific period and event. As the designer, I faced the plethora of objects that the staunch staff of Yad Vashem had collected over decades. My brief was to decide which ones would become part of the museum's story, and which would be returned to the storerooms. […] Throughout the whole process of assembling the exhibits, it was my arduous and frustrating task to sort and decide on the items."

- Dorit Harel, 'Facts and Feelings. Dilemmas in Designing the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum'

During the Holocaust period, Jewish mothers were brutally persecuted and forced to face a reality that negated their ability to fulfil their maternal duties – to give birth, raise their children and protect them

The survival of the family during the Holocaust rested largely on the resilience of the mother, who was expected to conduct a dual battle: the daily struggle for basic requirements, including food and healthcare for her family, at the same time shouldering responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of her children.

In the most fateful moments, many women were forced to make the hardest decision of all: to part from their children in order to give them a chance of life. They searched for hiding places for the little children, and encouraged the older ones to go off into the unknown.

Explore the multifaceted experience of motherhood during the Holocaust in this new online exhibition: https://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/motherhood

Izak and Chasia Kaplan from Bialystok, Poland, prewar. Both were murdered in 1943. 50,000 Jews lived in Bialystok prior to WWII, representing more than half of the city’s population. Most of the Jews in Bialystok were deported in August 1943 to Treblinka, Majdanek, Poniatowa, Blizyn and Auschwitz. Few Jews from Bialystok survived the camps, and some survived by hiding outside the ghetto in the Polish side of the city. Bialystok was liberated by Soviet troops in August 1944.

The film “Among Neighbors,” directed by Yoav Potash, USA 2024, was screened this week at Yad Vashem as part of the “Cinema Morning” documentary series, with the participation of Mr. Dani Dayan, Chairman of Yad Vashem, and two of the three children of the late Prof. Yaacov Goldstein, Holocaust survivor and protagonist of the film. After the screening, Dr. Chilik Weizmann of Bar Ilan University addressed the complex issue of Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

Yael Akunis, Yaacov’s daughter, concluded her remarks with these particularly moving words:
“For us, the family, Yad Vashem is not just ‘a place.’ It is particularly meaningful for us to have the film screened within its walls. My father was born in Gniewoszów , a small town between Warsaw and Lublin. He survived the war as a child, living apart from his parents, who managed to hide him. Six months after the war’s end, he was fortunate enough to see them again, only to lose them forever when his parents were murdered by their Polish neighbors. Despite concerted efforts, his baby brother, who was also hidden, was never located. Later, as a professor of history, my father founded and headed the Department of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. In his last years, he wrote a book describing his experiences, which was dedicated to his parents, his brother, and family members. The book, which was translated into English, as well as the film, were intended by my father to convey this history to future generations, and helped complete the circle of his life together with our mother."

Leyb Goldin’s race against starvation in the ghetto: a Yad Vashem Podcast: https://bit.ly/44kvDei

In August 1941, a young writer, Leyb Goldin, sat down to write about his day, struggling to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. This short piece of reportage, described as “a first-person account of a man slowly dying of hunger”, is extremely powerful in portraying the terror of starvation, and perhaps deserves a place up there with some of the famous works of holocaust literature.
Featured guest: David Roskies, Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.