“Each artefact is a witness […], a testament to lives interrupted, and a call to remember.”
— Sara Bloomfield, Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
80 Objects/80 Lives is a digital exhibition featuring 80 objects from filmed testimonies of British Holocaust survivors and refugees, presented as 80 individual Social Media posts. It is a project of the UK presidency of the International Holocaust and Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and was developed in partnership with the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Read more about the exhibition here.
Click the the ⓘ symbol on each object film to learn more about the person interviewed. Click the download button to save the film to your device.
Exhibition Team:
Curator: Dr Bea Lewkowicz
Design & Digital Assembly: Susanna Kleeman
Film Assembly: Simon Waxman
Researcher: Kristin Baumgartner
Objects like a teddy bear, a doll, a watch, or a spoon take on special meanings, when they become remnants of a lost world. A passport with the letter J, a yellow star, a bowl from Bergen-Belsen, become material witnesses of atrocities and persecution.
The 80 artefacts, photographs, documents and everyday items, create a tangible link to the lives of each testimony giver; to the before of a disrupted past and the traumatic experience of discrimination, exclusion, emigration, and survival. The objects are the carriers of memory and they connect the interviewees to lost communities, lost family members, and lost possessions and/or to specific moments in their own life journeys
80 Objects/80 Lives will provide an encounter with the women and men who have given testimony to the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive and the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, and with the objects they have chosen to speak about.
The chosen objects are presented in eight sections, according to broader themes: 1. Objects from Before. 2. Autograph Albums 3. Objects of Persecution 4. Objects of Emigration 5. Objects of New Lives 6. Camps and Ghetto Objects 7. Protection and Refuge Objects 8. Liberation and Post-War Objects.
The objects represent the very personal histories and experiences of the Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees before, during, and at the end of the Second World War. We need to keep in mind that many experiences of the Holocaust cannot be represented either through objects or narration, such as the mass shootings in forests, for example, as the victims did not survive to tell the story.
80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of WW2, 80 Objects/80 Lives provides a unique visual pathway into learning more about the Holocaust and learning more about the experiences of displacement, exile, and survival.
Each clip contains the symbol ⓘ, which, when clicked, will lead the user to the full page of the testimony giver and his/her interviews on the portal. Additionally, you can click the icons in the grid below to watch the associated object story.
—Dr Bea Lewkowicz, January 2025
