Yad Vashem races to preserve Holocaust artifacts as survivors dwindle

Helene Peled was always aware of her mother’s incredible story of survival during the Holocaust, but the discovery two years ago of a soot-covered shoe box hidden in an attic for more than 80 years has helped piece together some missing parts of the puzzle – and provided her with a crucial link to relatives who perished during the war.

Since its establishment in the 1950s, the sprawling World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem has collected first-hand accounts from survivors. Over the past 15 years, it has also increased its focus on artifacts – official papers, letters, and other personal belongings – as a way to gain a more detailed understanding of what happened to individuals during World War II.

Noiman said that while the museum has always collected such items, in 2011 it stepped up its appeals to the public to share family heirlooms and reorganized its collection process more systematically, focusing not only on an object itself but also on the story behind it.

That need has become even more urgent as the number dwindles of Holocaust survivors who can recount what happened to them and to those who were murdered.

“If a person has a photograph that survived the camps, it’s important for us to know how that photograph came into their possession,” Noiman said. “There is a whole story behind such an item.”

For Peled, that story is one of coincidence. Her daughter Ronit and son-in-law Shahar were in Krakow for a weekend break in 2023 and decided to visit the house where Peled’s mother grew up – and where Peled’s uncles and grandfather had hidden for most of the war.

While the men stayed in the attic, Peled’s Aryan-looking mother, Carolina, and grandmother Balbina posed as Jehovah’s Witnesses, sewing and selling swastika badges to conceal their Jewish identities and earn money for the family.

After the war, the nuclear family immigrated to the US. Peled grew up in New York before moving to Israel to be closer to her children and grandchildren.

“It’s a wild story,” she said of how the trove of documents was eventually found. “Shahar said to my daughter, ‘Why don’t we just go to your grandma’s house, to the block, just to look?’ So they went and stood outside. Then they heard construction sounds and followed the noise until they were outside my mom’s apartment… number 11, on the 4th floor,” Peled recounted.

She said that inside the apartment, a group of workers were ripping out walls and floors. Communicating via Google Translate, her daughter and son-in-law told the workers that their relatives had once lived there, and they were allowed inside to take a look around. One of the men then told them about a box of old documents they had found hidden in the wall beside the chimney.

Looking through the documents, Peled’s daughter immediately recognized the names and faces of her grandmother and great-grandparents. The stack included her grandparents Moshe and Balbina’s marriage certificate, Carolina’s birth certificate, and her uncles’ school report cards and work permits, as well as a wealth of postcards and letters from relatives she had only heard about but never met – including one from a great-aunt who wrote to her grandfather while being deported to a death camp.

Although the items were fragile, stained with black soot and water marks – and much of the handwriting had faded, making them difficult to read – Peled said she was “blown away” by the discovery.

“When I saw that postmark from 1943, wow!…Now I have a thousand questions,” she told the Report. “How did the neighbors not rat my grandma out? How did my grandma go through the day dressed as a babushka with a scarf tied around her cheeks and become a Jehovah’s Witness overnight? How did she do it?”

Peled said she is excited that Yad Vashem now has the documents, helping to build the broader puzzle of the Holocaust, and going through a careful conservation process so they survive another 80 years and more.

At the center’s newly built laboratory, paper conservator Yuval Sitton sits surrounded by paintbrushes, pots of special glue, gummy erasers, and thin microfiber tape: equipment he uses daily to clean and prepare Holocaust-era documents like those found by Peled’s daughter in Krakow.

“The whole idea of this work is to conserve these documents for future generations so that the original will still exist,” he said, noting the distinction between restoration – attempting to return an item to its original form, which is often impossible – and conservation.

“People ask us why this is so important; but today it is very important, especially with AI. With AI, you can invent whatever you want,” Sitton said. “You can draw a person with horns and make it look real.”

He strives to keep the documents as close to their original state as possible, focusing on cleaning, repair, legibility – and longevity.

However, while proper storage is critical for their preservation – packing documents in special acid-free envelopes or boxes and keeping them in rooms with a steady temperature of 20 degrees Celsius and around 50% humidity – documenting the backstory of each item is equally important.

“Nothing is obvious or self-evident,” said Noiman, explaining that when Yad Vashem first appealed to the public to submit Holocaust artifacts, many survivors arrived in person and recounted the story behind each object.

Today, as second- and third-generation survivors hand over their parents’ and grandparents’ belongings, her team still works to gather as much contextual information as possible – an essential process that adds further evidence of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. The collection process, Noiman emphasized, must be ongoing.

“When we look at the data, we’re talking about around 135,000 testimonies in total that sit in Yad Vashem’s collections,” she explained. “Some were collected immediately after the war by historical commissions, and others come from sources such as the Spielberg Foundation. But when we think about how many Jews ultimately survived the Holocaust, this number is actually very low.”

For Peled, who has returned to her mother’s apartment several times since the documents were discovered and even befriended the current owner, having the items preserved for her, her three children, and her five grandchildren, “sends chills” down her spine and sharpens her parents’ presence in her life.

“My parents are always with me, and I do hear their voices. I have that crazy intuition,” Peled said, adding, “Whether they put them [the documents] in an exhibition or store them in a closet, we are all very excited to see what Yad Vashem has done with them.”  ■