Holocaust museum shines light on loss with exhibition of objects it is missing

The audio guide takes visitors through objects which are missing from the museum.

The smell of a grandfather's beard. The feel of a long-lost teddy bear. Gestapo officers' pounding footsteps.

These are some of the memories recounted by Holocaust survivors in an exhibition in Huddersfield which seeks to "give space to the intangible".

Holocaust Centre North's curators said they wanted visitors to think differently about its collections by focusing on what was missing.

Its new audio guide contains interviews with survivors who fled to Yorkshire.

While conventional exhibition guides focused on objects on display, the museum said its "unusual sound-based roadmap" would encourage visitors to "reflect on the losses and absence felt by survivors and their families".

The museum opened in 2018.

The guide, called Encountering Survival, includes 10 individual tracks exploring beloved objects, long-lost homes and familiar smells.

It features voices from the museum's archives as well as new interviews with Leeds-based survivors and their families.

The guide documents the chilling experience of Suzanne Ripton, who recalls hiding under the bed as Gestapo officers climbed the stairs of her home and broke down the door with an axe.

She also describes the smell of her grandfather's beard as she hugged him for the last time before escaping France with her mother.

Trude Silman's family hid a painting from Nazi looters.

Also featured is Trude Silman, 93, who recalls a painting that hung in her childhood home in Bratislava before her family hid it on a farm to protect it from Nazi soldiers who were looting Jewish-owned artworks.

The guide also includes an interview with Liesel Carter, who shares her memories of leaving Germany as a four-year-old with nothing but her favourite teddy bear.

'Empathising with pain'

The guide was created by artists Louise K. Wilson and Linda O Keeffe as part of the Imperial War Museum's Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Project.

Ms O Keefe said: "To empathise with someone's pain in war, you just have to understand a tiny moment of what it can do to your life and feel that pain.

"When you hear someone describe the smell of their grandad's beard, knowing it was the last time they would see them, you understand more about what it would be like to look at a person you love and have to say goodbye for the last time."

Holocaust Centre North's director Alessandro Bucci said: "We have a collection of over 6,000 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 museum, which opened in 2018 at the University of Huddersfield's Queensgate campus, has also made the 10 audio tracks available to listen to on its website with accompanying visuals by artist Aous Hamoud.