A Huddersfield heritage centre wants to help people think about its collections differently by producing a guide to what isn’t there.
Holocaust Centre North (HCN), on the University of Huddersfield Queensgate Campus, has created a series of audio guides that encapsulate the memories of survivors and refugees who built new lives in the north of England after fleeing persecution. And, while conventional exhibitions focus on objects that exist, the guides encourage people to explore the losses and absence felt by survivors and their families.
Encountering Survival, created for HCN by artists Louise K Wilson and Linda O Keeffe, is a series of 10 individual tracks including interviews with survivors and their families. By exploring the memories of beloved objects, long-lost homes and familiar smells, HCN hopes listeners will make connections with the stories of forced migration, trauma, loss and persecution, and their vital place in history.
“Collecting, preserving, caring for and sharing the stories from the Northern community of Holocaust survivors and their families is our primary objective at HCN,” says centre director Allesandro Bucci.
“We have a collection of over 6000 items but we are aware of so much that cannot be preserved for posterity, either because it was lost, destroyed, stolen, or left behind, or because it is immaterial and can’t be cared for in an archive. Memories, feelings of a mood at a certain time, the sound or smell of something. This audio guide focuses on this aspect – the stories behind what is absent.”
The stories in the guides feature the voices of survivors recorded for the archives, as well as interviews with Leeds-based survivors and their families that were recorded especially for the exhibition.
They include Trude Silman’s memories of her childhood home in Bratislava, where she would watch her father teach himself English at his desk so he could write to his daughter after they were separated. He was tragically taken away by Nazis just two weeks later. Trude also recalls a painting in an ornate frame that hung in the Bratislava home, later retrieved from its hiding place in a Bratislava farm and now hanging in the Harrogate home of her daughter Judith.
Liesel Carter shares her memories of leaving Germany on a boat at the age of four with her favourite teddy bear, the only toy she was able to bring. The toy was later destroyed by cousins who deemed her too old to play with teddy bears.
The chilling experience of being pushed under the bed by her mother and hearing the heavy footsteps of the Gestapo coming up wooden and breaking the door with an axe is recounted by Suzanne Ripton. She describes later saying goodbye to her grandparents shortly before escaping Poland with her mother, and the smell of her grandfather’s long, white beard as she gave him a final hug.
“To understand and empathise with someone’s pain in war, you just have to understand a tiny moment of what it can do to your life and empathise and feel that pain,” says artist and co-creator of the audio guides Linda O Keeffe.
“You just have to hear someone talk about the last moments they smelt grandad’s beard and hugged them as a child and knew it was the last time they would see them. Then you can understand what it would be like to look at the person you love and have to say goodbye for the last time.”
Paula Kolar is curator of contemporary practices at HCN. “The survivor community now includes children and grandchildren, all of whom we have a very strong connection with and responsibility to,” she says.
“It’s very important to acknowledge the significance of what it means to remember over the course of a lifetime and the continuing impact on families in the area. With the audio guides, we have been able to create a tangible way to give space to the intangible and honour these experiences.”
The ten tracks, which are between four and 13 minutes in length, can be heard by visitors to the HCN exhibitions. They are also available to listen to online at https://audioguides.hcn.org.uk/, with accompanying visuals by artist Aous Hamoud.
“The nature of our topic can be difficult for some visitors to process in one sitting,” says Alessandro Bucci. “This is why we wanted our audio guide to be something that visitors can take home with them and listen to in their own time.”
