The Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg, the Wiener Holocaust Library London and the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester are pleased to co-host a virtual event for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026. The event is organised in response to the 2026 HMD theme ‘Bridging Generations’.
As Holocaust survivors become fewer, an urgent question comes into focus: how do we remember those who were murdered when living witnesses are no longer with us?
This panel brings together scholars and children of survivors to explore the role of material objects – personal belongings and everyday items, often preserved in private collections – as carriers of memory. Ordinary things such as clothing, jewelry, and household items can bear the weight of extraordinary loss, linking individual lives to collective history and connecting memories across generations.
Through three contributions, we reflect on what it means to remember through things and on the ways material objects shape Holocaust memory today. To what extent can material culture sustain memory beyond testimony? What questions does this raise about working with personal collections and ‘unusual’ archives, about the care, display, and interpretation of objects and the stories we tell through them?
Speakers:
Hannah Wilson, postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester, will introduce a case study from her current research: the home of Steven Frank, a Dutch Jewish child survivor and later Holocaust educator, as a domestic archive. Moving beyond testimony, her research shows how everyday objects carry memory, trauma, and survival across generations, and how material culture sustains Holocaust memory within family spaces.
Deborah Jaffé will discuss how the discovery of letters, documents and objects led to a reappraisal of her father’s and grandparents’ lives in and escape from 1930s Germany. She will cover the finding and resonance of the material brought and the importance of keeping everything, no matter how ephemeral, to understand more fully what happened.
Svenja Bethke, Associate Professor of Modern European History at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, will contextualise the discussion on material culture and memory in relation to the Holocaust.
The event will be held on Zoom. Please register here.
The Wiener Holocaust Library will send you a Zoom link and joining instructions via email prior to the event. Please check your junk email folders. The event will be recorded. Your webcam will not be seen during this event.
Image: Keith Gandy via Wikimedia Commons