‘Every piece of evidence is vital’: Holocaust survivor calls for victims’ shoes to be salvaged | Holocaust
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One of the last remaining survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof has called on authorities to save fragments of tens of thousands of shoes belonging to those killed holocaust victims who were recently found in a forest at the site.
Manfred Goldberg, who was imprisoned as a teenager at Stutthof, 24 miles (38 km) east of Gdansk, said he was “shocked and horrified” to hear of existence from the remains, eight decades after the shoes’ owners were forced to remove them before they were gassed and cremated.
Goldberg, 94, who was deported with other Jews, including his mother Rosa and brother Hermann, from their hometown of Kassel in Germanysaid he remembers seeing “mountains” of shoes in the camp.
“I remember the shoes. I also remember being told that when the Jews were chosen to be gassed as they walked to the gas chamber, they were supposed to throw their shoes in a pile,” he said.
In 2017, Goldberg returned to the camp for the first time, near what is now the village of Stutowo on Poland’s Baltic coast, to accompany the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on a visit to the Stutthof Museum. He faced the sight of thousands of shoes that were gathered in a glass cabinet.
But he was horrified to learn last month that only a small fraction of the prisoners’ shoes had been collected at the museum, with the rest left in the forest where the Stutthof camp once stood. He said the failure to systematically detect and prepare them was “truly shocking and disrespectful”.
“This is inhumane. Shows complete indifference and disrespect. Let’s just throw them in the woods and let nature do its thing,” Goldberg said in an interview with Zoom from his home in London, the city where he took refuge at 16 after the war.
Goldberg called on Polish authorities to find the shoes and recommended a reconstruction of the mountain, which he remembers seeing as a teenage prisoner.
“If these shoes are restored and processed to make them presentable again, perhaps replacing them exactly where they were found in the Stutthof camp itself, [it] it would be a striking image for people to watch,” he said. “And I think that can give it additional international importance and impact.”
Stutthof, built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later expanded to become a mostly Jewish extermination camp, served as a leather repair assembly point for all of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, most already Auschwitz.
Goldberg, who was sharing his harrowing testimony in schools and universities since 2004, used a striking photo in his PowerPoint presentation of a towering pile of shoes taken by a Red Army soldier after she liberated the camp in June 1945.
“I include it to help people assimilate or understand the scale of the disaster we’re talking about,” he said. “Otherwise, it is difficult to understand what the astronomical numbers – the 6 million killed in the Holocaust – actually represent.
“So I’m asking people to look at this amount of shoes and just accept that each pair … represents one human being who probably minutes after their shoes were thrown on that pile, lost their life in a gas chamber.”
Goldberg said that just as survivors like him were “among the last witnesses” of the Holocaust, as well as shoes. At a time of rising anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, he said, “any evidence is vital.”
“We’re seeing where the disappearance of that evidence contributes to people being able to say these things didn’t happen,” he said.
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Responses to the opening of Stutthof shoes, following a campaign led by a poet, musician and activist from Gdańsk, Grzegorz Kwiatkowskithey come from the entire Jewish community.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, has led calls for an international committee of experts to help Stutthof curators “deal with the material legacy of Nazi crimes”.
“It personalizes the Holocaust, it’s what you remember. And if preserving the death camps is largely about making sure people don’t forget, these shoes help you not forget,” he said. Haaretz.
Michael Newman, chief executive of the UK Jewish Refugee Association, called the Stutthof shoes “poignant symbols of human lives lost”.
He said: “They epitomize individual suffering while at the same time shedding light on one of the darkest moments in living memory. In this time of heightened anti-Semitism in this country and globally, it is imperative that we teach the lessons and warnings of the Holocaust. Revealing the full size of the shoes is an inescapable reminder of the enormity of the Holocaust and honors the lives lost.”
Piotr Ripson, the newly appointed director of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, has announced nearly 300,000 zlotys (£60,000) of funding for “further archaeological research” in the forest.
He said the ministry would also offer support for further research into the extent to which shoes were part of the economic aspect of the Nazi killing machine.
When contacted by the Guardian, museum spokesman Łukasz Kępski said: “We would be happy to speak to Mr Goldberg in person, as well as Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, to hear their insights, their suggestions.”
He said the museum is waiting for funds to arrive from the Ministry of Culture. Boards were recently put up in the forest informing visitors what to do if they come across pieces of shoes, he said.
For Goldberg, it’s a matter of recognizing shoes for the valuable objects they are before it’s too late. “It simply cannot be considered acceptable or honorable to leave them in the mud of the forest,” he said.
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