The Haunting Artifacts of the Holocaust

The pictures are haunting: black-and-white prints of a snow-covered barracks and paintings bordered by wire fences and skeletal trees, grim depictions of a World War II camp in France where Jews were interned before being transported to concentration camps.

The artist, Jacques Gotko, displayed remarkable creativity under dire circumstances. One of his works was created using a background of crushed eggshells glued to a wooden board; for others, he ingeniously used a piece of old tire as a printing block. These materials were scarce in the camp where he was held before being transported to Drancy, another camp in France, then Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, in 1943.

Fragile and rarely displayed, these works are part of a massive repository of Holocaust-related artifacts collected over the years by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The collection includes millions of pages of documents, tens of thousands of pages of testimony, artworks, personal belongings, and more than half a million photographs.

Most of these invaluable artifacts had been scattered around Yad Vashem’s vast campus, but they will now be housed in a new center that will allow easier access for researchers and provide the most advanced technological conditions to safeguard them for future generations. The recently completed center was inaugurated on Monday.

The urgency of preserving these artifacts has become increasingly crucial as the Holocaust drifts further into history, with the number of survivors dwindling. Simultaneously, the resurgence of antisemitism and extremism worldwide underscores the importance of remembering the atrocities of the past, according to Yad Vashem officials.

“These artifacts are the crown jewels of the Jewish people,” remarked Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem. “There is no Judaism without historical remembrance.”