I’m predicting that one image from this show will be included in all the coverage in the press and on TV. It’s a shadowy colour portrait by Jillian Edelstein of an old man presenting a tiny golden teddy bear to the camera, clutched in both his hands. The man is John Hajdu, born in Budapest in 1937. He survived horrendous conditions in the city’s ghetto before it was liberated by the Russians. He’s here in the gallery today, and produces his childhood friend from his jacket pocket tenderly. ‘It was all I was able to take with me,’ he says.
The Imperial War Museum’s ‘Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors’ is not a grim show of horrors. Deliberately. It confronts what we think we know about the modern era’s greatest crime against humanity. It makes it less remote, less umbrageous, less something that occurred ‘in the past’. That’s not to say that it’s not full of suffering and tragedy. Every one of these 50-plus contemporary portraits of those who survived the Holocaust contains a story of unimaginable pain, fear and loss. But it’s also uplifting. The 13 photographers portray these people’s lives today: with their families, in their homes and gardens, in the sun, in colour. There’s no black-and-white or blurry cropping – things we’re used to seeing in hasty covert shots of ghettoes, transports and camps.
Particularly affecting is Simon Roberts’s series of videos. Dr Martin Stern is filmed sitting in his garden, but the voiceover is that of his granddaughter Isobel recalling him telling her about his childhood when she was ten. ‘I was probably a bit young to understand,’ she says.
The show precedes the opening of the IWM’s new WWII and Holocaust galleries in October, but it’s a fantastic achievement in its own right. One of the most frightening parts of the legacy of the Holocaust remains the fact that it is too much to confront, too appalling to engage with, so it’s horribly easy just to bypass it. But the stories of these people are as much part of history as the millions of dead. There’s no barbed wire or piles of skeletal corpses in this show. There is plenty of defiance, and lots of eye contact and smiling; these subjects have refused to have their lives defined by the horrors inflicted on them, and they radiate with life. It’s timely, too. All these men and women arrived as children in a country that was often unwelcoming and antipathetic to refugees. I don’t suppose today’s social-media Nazis will come and see a show full of old Jews, but they definitely fucking should. Everyone else should too.
‘Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors’ is at the Imperial War Museum. Aug 6-Jan 7 2022. Free.
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