Video
5 min 13 sec
Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of the Black, Kubie, and Simon families

The Gaps Between the Unforgettable explores Holocaust Centre North’s conflicting and complex position as steward and curator of public memory. Materials from the archive are enlarged, held, and repositioned – an invitation to consider the care, labour, and intention that goes behind sustaining an archive and the stories it contains. Simultaneously, The Gaps Between the Unforgettable urges us to consider a formation of history that also includes those who do not get to be documented, and whose images do not survive long enough to become archivable.

With thanks to the Black, Kubie, and Eger families whose collections
feature in the work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

Shown in the film is a toy fort that Tom Kubie won and played with as a young child. Tom, his parents and his elder brothers came to the UK as refugees from Czechoslovakia in July 1939, when Tom
was four years old. Many of their extended family were murdered in the Holocaust.
Holocaust Centre North, courtesy of the Kubie family.

2025. Video
2 min 51 sec

Maud Haya-Baviera’s If By Night, A Stranger takes inspiration from
the letters of Alice Mendel, who sought refuge for herself and her
daughter following her husband’s incarceration in Buchenwald during
the November Pogrom in 1938. The video features two women in
conversation through the lens of the camera, shown in alternating
frames. One—played by the artist—performs a staged expression
of emotion; the other attempts to interpret these gestures into
British Sign Language. As meaning repeatedly slips from reach, both
women eventually face the camera in silence, caught in a moment
of helplessness. Played on a loop, the allegory gains in poignancy by
repeated watch.

In If By Night, A Stranger, Haya-Baviera gives form to questions
shared by many of the Memorial Gestures artists: How can we
translate and communicate the emotions and experiences of
Holocaust survivors and their murdered relatives? Can we ever
fully understand?

This is the first in a series of four works created by Haya-Baviera
during her residency at Holocaust Centre North.

With thanks to the Mendel family, whose collection inspired this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2025. Ceramic slabs, suspended by chain, 70 x 100 x 6 cm.

“In the back of my mind,” spoken by Charlotte “Lottie” Gross (later
Gross-Brauer) in the Harris House reunion film, reflects on how
trauma lives quietly within. These words anchor Irina Razumovskaya’s
Archaeology of Absence, a deeply affecting installation shaped by
collections in the Holocaust Centre North Archive and the artist’s
own grief. Suspended porcelain slabs, echoing window frames,
form a ghostly house defined by voids. Their dual surfaces speak
of contrasting worlds: the reverse clad in white tiles, recalling the
sanitised spaces of arrival at concentration camps; the front cracked
and marked by traces of hands and scratches, resisting erasure.
Razumovskaya explores trauma as a lifelong duality, paralleled by
her own private loss — carried quietly through moments of joy and
ordinariness. This installation is a sanctuary of memory. As Holocaust
witnesses fade and history risks distortion, Archaeology of Absence
offers not spectacle, but presence: a fragile yet insistent reminder
that silence, too, holds stories.

With thanks to the Eger family archive whose collection inspired
this work, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2025. Steel, glazed porcelain and Mason Stains
10 x 24 x14 cm

In Maud Haya-Baviera’s Aching, two steel structures, alluding
to a construct reminiscent of incarceration, replace a plinth,
which would traditionally be associated with the display of
sculptural forms. These steel structures host but also separate
two ceramic hands frozen in an attempt to touch. Their delicate
and fragile presence is in direct contrast to the harshness of the
steel. They appear somehow arrested in a moment of peaceful
gesture, yet something is oozing from one of the hands and a red
thumb is a sore that the eye can’t ignore. This work emerged from
a close reading of Alice Mendel’s letters in which she expressed
her desperate need to leave a country where she felt trapped and
where she and her loved ones were deeply endangered. Her letters
are addressed to Gladys Reid, a British woman who with care and
kindness, redoubled her efforts to save the Mendel family.

The work speaks of a wound that never fully heals and from which
pain continues to seep through, but it also evokes a sense of longing,
of love and the desire for proximity.

With thanks to the Mendel family, whose collection inspired this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2025. dry point etchings
sizes varying between 30 x 21 cm – 84 x 42 cm

Carefully arranged on a display table, the intimate scale of Hannah
Machover’s etchings invites viewers to lean in. Distilled into potent lines
are experiences of internment and isolation from loved ones, drawn
from letters written by Jewish refugees in Britain who were reclassified
as ‘enemy aliens’ following the country’s entry into the war in 1939. Her
delicate, complex compositions evoke a sense of confinement and hint
at vast, interior landscapes of solitude. At once surreal and allegorical,
Machover’s compositions centre quiet gestures of care and support: a
parcel thoughtfully wrapped, a shirt mended by a loved one’s hand.

Each of the twelve etchings draws from a rich constellation of
references gathered during Machover’s residency. These include letters
from the Carry Gorney and Heinz Skyte collections in the Holocaust
Centre North Archive, as well as echoes of lines and imagery found in
literature, art history, and the stories passed down in Machover’s own
family, who fled antisemitism in central Europe.

With thanks to Carry Gorney and the Skyte family whose collections
inspired this work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive. Table
by Louie Isaaman-Jones, with initial design by Joseph Bradley Hill.
Title booklets designed with Joseph Bradley Hill.

1.1 left sole: ‘My aunties smuggled their jewellery in their underwear, nailed into the soles of their shoes,
sewn into the lining of their coats’ (30 x 21 cm)
1.2 right sole: ‘My aunties smuggled their jewellery in their underwear, nailed into the soles of their shoes,
sewn into the lining of their coats’ (30 x 21 cm)
1.3 pressed flowers: ‘six beautiful dark red carnations from my lover’ (30 x 21 cm)
2.1 tear I, barbed wire: ‘The air is very clear.’ (30 x 21 cm)
2.2 tear II, letter: ‘Your old man at the helm.’ (30 x 21 cm)
2.3 tear III, parcel: ‘Those are my wishes for today.’ (30 x 21 cm)
3.1 envelope I, feeding the yarn: ‘We put the parcels together together’ (42 x 30 cm)
3.2 envelope II, dream at the window: ’The curtains would eventually be drawn’ (42 x 30 cm)
3.3 envelope III, close fold: ‘Next year I’ll do everything.’ (42 x 30 cm)
4.1 envelope IV: ’I must shorten this letter’ (84 x 42 cm)
4.2 envelope V, repaired shirt: ’I’d prefer it if you would keep an eye on buttons and holes’ (84 x 42 cm)
4.3 envelope VI, opened by censor: ’You know very well how I treasure everything’ (84 x 42 cm)

2025. Super 8 film transferred to 4K video file, 2 min 36 sec

Maud Haya-Baviera’s Trying to Bring Back by Magic unfolds in quiet
loops of 16mm film: split-screen footage in which the artist handles
replicas of photographs from Holocaust Centre North Archive with a ritualistic, almost spell-like attention. In her hands, black-and-white faces and scenes are conjured, held, and gently made to vanish—appearing like ghosts, disappearing like memories. Set
against yellow and violet tablecloths, the images glow faintly, as if
lit from within, fragile and luminous against time.

The silent footage is accompanied by a melancholic lullaby—a series
of syllables stitched together into song. Beneath the melody, other
voices rise and fall, layering the sound like breath, like memory
passed from one person to another. It is a chorus—a reminder that
remembrance is a connective experience.

With tenderness and wry grace, Haya-Baviera takes on a task
that is, in truth, impossible—but deeply, desperately wished to be
possible: to conjure the presence of those who are no longer here,
to reach across time toward lives that ended too soon and too
brutally. There is no illusion of bringing them back. But in the flicker
of film, in the hush of an image appearing and disappearing beneath
her hands, something stirs. She invites us to feel fragile, flickering
and real traces, and in that invitation, something returns. Not as it
was, but as it lingers in memory: glowing, weightless, and briefly
held. Not through magic, but through care.

With thanks to the Kubie family, whose collection features in this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive. Audio produced
as part of public workshops held at Manchester Jewish Museum in
response to letters from Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy
of Rachel Mendel. Many thanks to the MJM songwriting group.

2025. Installation of pastel drawings on black paper and risograph printed publication 

Across seven panels, Chebo Roitter Pavez weaves together the
voices of 16 Holocaust survivors, tracing the spread of Nazi ideology
across Europe and the escalating discrimination, persecution, and
violence faced by Jewish communities. Set against black paper, his vivid,
gestural lines merge writing and drawing into layered visual tapestries
that foreground the resilience of Jewish life in the face of centuries-old
antisemitism—and, in particular, the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

Roitter Pavez’s aesthetic is grounded in wide-ranging visual research into
the cultural heritage of European Jewry, from the Middle Ages to the
early twentieth century. He draws from the work of Jewish artists whose
legacies persist despite historical efforts to erase them.

His effort to chronicle the rise of Nazism is also a reflection on the
persistence of fascist ideologies today, and urges viewers to recognise
how such narratives can resurface, often in new forms, if left unchallenged.

With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Liesel
Carter, John Chillag, Ibi Ginsburg, Arek Hersh, Martin Kapel, Klaus Samson,
Trude Silman, Ruth & Ernest Sterne & the families of John Martins, Joanna
Leser, Tom Kubie, Heinz Skyte & Iby Knill – Chris Knill & Pauline Kinch.
Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

1 – THERE IS STILL LIGHT, THEREFORE WE CAN SEE. Fortunate enough to tell a story. (150 x 145 cm)

2 – ALL COLORS ARE PRESENT IN A SINGLE BEAM OF LIGHT. Assimilation and Difference. (150 x 190 cm)

3 – EVERYTHING IS WITHIN GRAVITY’S PULL – A POINT IS REACHED, BEYOND WHICH THERE IS NO RETURN. Country and city (150 x 75 cm)

4 – A COLLAPSE THAT TEARS APART THE FABRIC OF SPACE & TIME. Manifestations of violence.(150 x 100 cm)

5 – SINGULARITY TRIES TO ENGULF MULTIPLICITY. Learning Environment and Yellow Stars.(150 x 100 cm)

6 – VASTNESS IS CRUMPLED INTO A SINGLE POINT OF INFINITE DENSITY.
Anschluss, Kristallnacht and 1939. (150 x 150 cm)

7 – THE VOID WILL REMAIN UNTIL THE END OF TIME, CASTING AN UNKNOWABLE SHADOW.
The Universal Holocaust (150 x 150 cm)

A Glimpse at the Abyss – Early recollections of racism, absolute power and instrumentalised cruelty.
Gold risography over black paper book, 14.85 x 21 cm

2023. Video, 20 min 38 sec 

These Were Not Simple Deaths features Lilian Black OBE, reflecting
on her father Eugene Black’s experiences during and after the
Holocaust, as well as her own deep sense of responsibility as the
daughter of a survivor. Eugene was the only member of his immediate
family to survive, apart from his elder brother. He was liberated from
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after enduring unimaginable
suffering, including forced labour at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In the film, Lilian recounts how she first learned about her father’s
past by accident during childhood, and how that discovery shaped
their later journey together to the sites of his imprisonment. Her
voice is accompanied by images of tall, mature trees moving gently
in the breeze beneath a deep, midnight blue sky. It is early spring,
and the trees are just beginning to bud. The camera never reveals
the ground or surrounding environment—only the crowns of the
trees, illuminated by golden light, rising above a darkened landscape.
Gradually, the sound of passing traffic emerges, anchoring the scene
in the present and hinting at a contemporary, urban setting.

Lilian Black was a passionate advocate for Holocaust education. She
served as Chair of the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association
and was the founding force behind Holocaust Centre North. The
original audio of her interview, recorded by Dr Tracy Craggs in 2016,
forms the emotional core of this work.

With thanks to Lilian Black & Frank Griffiths. Courtesy of Matt’s Gallery
(London), Jordan Baseman and Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2025. Installation 

Laura Nathan’s site-specific installation Unpicking: The Gannex and I
interlaces textiles, print, video, sound, and archive photography to tell a
story of trauma, resilience, and repair—echoing the artist’s own heritage as
the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

Driven by a desire to learn from other survivors and their descendants Nathan
undertook this exploration through a tactile dialogue with a Gannex coat.
Gannex fabric was invented by Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor Joseph Kagan
in 1951 and at the peak of its success the Kagan Textiles Ltd factory employed
up to 1,000 people in Yorkshire.

Over the course of eight months, the threads of one coat were picked apart
alongside the life story of its inventor. The first of two video works in this
installation shows the artist’s life-sized hands, working to separate panel from
panel, stitch from stitch, and finally single wefts from warps. Three dry point
etchings document the marks made by the artist in her rigorous unpicking process.
The composites of the coat are displayed on a table in neatly arranged piles.

A second video traces Nathan’s attempt to reweave the fabric on a small loom.
She knots together salvaged threads, coaxing them back into alignment. The
result is a delicate and imperfect textile, its uneven weave visibly interrupted by
the scars of its own making—knots, gaps, and sudden shifts in tension.

Nathan’s laborious interrogations took place while listening to the words of
those who worked at Kagan Textiles Ltd and elsewhere in Yorkshire’s textile
industry. The gallery space (itself an old textile mill) is filled with the sounds of
weaving looms and the voices of Holocaust survivors, refugees and immigrants
who built new lives here. This included South Asian migrants who experienced
the Partition of India in 1947.

With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Ibi & Val
Ginsburg, Hannah Goldstone & Mike Wertheim, Jen Kagan, Iby Knill, Chris Knill,
Pauline Kinch, and Julia Kinch. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive

White Line Project, held by Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield: Dr Nasim
Hasnie, Mohammed Hanif Asad, Sajida Ismail, Mahamood Kler, Gian Singh Sahota.

2025. Installation of carpet, table, overhead lamp, projection, and artist book 

Interrupting the gallery space with its vivid orange carpet, Ariane
Schick’s installation invites visitors into a snapshot of the life of
Emanuel Culman and his parents, Holocaust survivors Edith and
Emil Culman. Emanuel—known as ‘Manny’ to friends and family—lends
his name to the installation and its two parts: a book and a frame-by-frame animation. Contrasting in their approach to time, emotion, and form, the two works offer a complementary perspective on
intergenerational trauma. The installation is shaped in part by Schick’s
own family history as the descendant of Holocaust refugees.

Manny (book) is a tender and expansive portrait of a family, beginning
with Manny’s birth in 1945 and ending with his death. Across 750
pages, letters and notes between Manny and his parents trace
a lifelong bond—filled with love, frustration, humour, and longing.
Too vast to read straight through, the book invites quiet moments of
discovery, as readers encounter Manny’s voice in vivid, personal letters
sent from the U.S. to his parents in Leeds. Alongside these, Schick
includes a selection of photographs by Edith Culman. Hundreds of
such images, now held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, depict
everyday life with warmth, humour, and a striking emotional sensitivity.

Superimposed onto Manny (book) is a frame-by-frame animation of
the same name. Inspired by a drawing from the Culman collection,
Schick brings to life an anthropomorphised 1970s American car, whose
shifting expressions—joy, love, confusion, sadness—play out as its
wheels continue to turn.

By focusing on the post-1945 lives of Edith, Emil, and Manny, Ariane
Schick invites us into a story of survival rarely told–a story that
celebrates ordinary and universal human experiences in the wake of
trauma and honours the lasting contributions to art, counterculture
and community made by Holocaust survivors.

With thanks to the Culman family who collection features in this work.
Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2025. Wooden plinth with book and projection of film produced by Sierra Kaag and Paula Kolar 

Sierra Kaag’s work-in-progress explores the journeys of objects
from their origins, through the Holocaust, to their arrival in the
Holocaust Centre North Archive. Her focus is a collection of
books that once belonged to Hugo Friedmann, brought by him
into the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt and used as part of a
small library there.

For this exhibition, Kaag draws attention to a single title: Der Künstler
und der Führer (The Artist and the Leader) by Max Liebermann.
She presents a copy of the same edition held in the Holocaust
Centre North Archive, originally donated by the Kubie family. The
accompanying film, created in collaboration with curator Paula
Kolar, reflects on the journey of the Friedmann family, the trajectory
of the books, and the threads that bind them.

With thanks to the Kubie family whose collection features in this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

Film contains excerpt from ‘Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film,
1944’ by Kurt Gerron and Ivan Fric. Archival reference: RG-60.0269.
Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The book, ‘Der Künstler und der Führer’ (The Artist and the Leader), by Max Liebermann,
belonged to Hugo Friedmann, uncle of child refugee Tom Kubie. Hugo, his wife Hildegard
and their children Hans Georg and Liselotte were deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt ghetto-camp in 1942. Much to Hildegard’s dismay, Hugo used much of his luggage allowance to bring his books into Theresienstadt with him. The couple were later deported to Auschwitz, where Hildegard was murdered in October 1944. Hugo died in the Kaufering subcamp of Dachau in 1945. Another copy of the same edition as that held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive is on display in this installation.

Holocaust Centre North, courtesy of the Kubie family.

2025. Video, 4 min 32 sec 

Hard Lands was filmed on the site of a former concentration
camp and features haunting images of a desolate French
countryside in winter. It is here that the artist’s grandfather
was interned during the Second World War.

The traces of the camp are just visible in the overgrown structures
and abandoned houses – their windows either boarded up or existing
as gaping openings to a dark emptiness within. The accompanying
soundtrack consists of a sweeping and relentless melody, created
by a synthetic chorus. It highlights and contrasts the lifeless
visuals, drawing out the emotions and experiences buried deep in
the foundations of the landscape.

On her pilgrimage the artist encountered others who had travelled
to the site, seeking to see what is no longer there. Hard Lands is the final and most personal of the works presented by Haya-Baviera in this exhibition. It was also the first work the artist made during her residency, a personal overture of sorts, setting the tone for a body of work that rings and wrings with the urgency
of mediating Holocaust history at a time when racist and anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

2025. Printed photographs mounted on boards, ceramic tiles with graphite inscriptions, kiln fired and mounted on board. 65 x 60 cm 

§175 was the legal code used to criminalise same-sex desire in Germany.
Originally implemented in the 19th century, it was fervently expanded and
strictly enforced under Nazi rule. Matt J Smith’s §175 consists of three works
combining ceramics and photographic collage.

At the centre of the installation, small clay brick tiles form a blank grid. From
a list of 231 pink triangle prisoners murdered in a Sachsenhausen subcamp,
175 names were carefully inscribed in graphite. During firing, the graphite
burned away—erasing the record, as their lives had been.

In 1935, §175 was expanded upon: men could now be imprisoned for 5 years
for a quick kiss or a touch that lingered too long. By 1944 no physical contact
needed to have taken place, with just the intention of homosexual behaviour
enough to lead to incarceration.

The photographs on the left panel show images from Holocaust Centre
North’s Archive. In these photos same sex desire could be inferred, even if
they depict groups of friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters or cousins. None
of the individuals shown are known to have been gay. And yet, in a culture of
widespread surveillance and persecution, even innocent gestures of affection
between people of the same sex could become subject to scrutiny.

Smith’s work reflects on how such a culture of generalised suspicion affected
those directly targeted, but also shaped how people related to each other
more broadly—how they moved, how they touched, how they were seen.
His interest lies in understanding how persecution reshaped behaviours,
relationships, and the meanings that could be projected onto ordinary images.

In the Holocaust Centre North Archive, the belongings of Jewish victims of
Nazi persecution are cared for and their memories are protected by loved
ones. Each family was contacted before the use of photographs was granted.

The panel to the right depicts two images from a Nazi medical publication.
Some pink triangle prisoners were offered potential early release from camps
if they agreed to castration. The images show the same pink triangle prisoner
before and after being castrated. We do not know his name and can only assume
his permission was not sought before publication. Unwilling to reproduce the
framed images, the artist cut them from the pages of the original publication.

The persecution of gay men did not end at liberation. Surviving pink triangle
prisoners after liberation from concentration camps were often rearrested
based on Nazi evidence and reimprisoned if they had not completed their
sentence. §175 remained in the West German criminal code until 1994.
Shame stopped many families reuniting with their pink triangle relatives
or remembering them publicly, perpetuating the erasure of their lives and
suffering from collective memory.

With thanks to the families whose collections feature in this work: Vera Banasch,
Michelle Green, John Martins and family, Edith Spencer, and the Dalton, Hartland
and Lennard families. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2023. Monotypes on 240 gsm Arches Johannot paper, 56 x 76 cm. Graphite on 160gsm Velin d’Arches paper, 48 x 64 cm 

Space Between is a series of monotypes which mediate the
relationship between loss and presence. Created in March 2023
with collaboration from Tom Kubie–a Holocaust survivor who
escaped to England from Czechoslovakia with his family in 1939.
This series is based on the hand gestures of Tom’s family members,
traced from photographs in albums that were recovered after the
war.

The images offer an intimate elegy to a lost world, capturing
moments of tenderness and affection preserved in prewar family
snapshots. In these drawings, attention is given to what often
goes unnoticed—the space between hands, the gaps in memory,
the outlines of what once was. Here, the visible shapes suggest
memory and presence; the spaces around them speak to absence
and the things we cannot fully know.

With thanks to the Kubie family whose collection inspired this work.
Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2023. Artist book, cotton thread embroidered on wool felt, 15 x 17 x 2.5 cm 

This artist’s book is based on a photograph and letter given
by Hilel Erner to his wife and children before the family were
separated in 1940. Using a printed scan of the letter as a guide,
Laura Fisher carefully embroidered Hilel’s handwritten words in
thread, preserving both his message and his handwriting through
touch and time.

The letter reads:
Damit meine beiden Kinder nicht vergessen wie ihr Papa aussieht
schicke ich dieses Bild, in der Hoffnung das sie es genau so
lieb haben wie als ich bei euch wäre. Tausend Küsse und alles
gute für mein(e) Frau und die Kinder. Hilel

English translation:
So that my two children do not forget what their papa looks
like, I send this picture, in the hope that they will hold it
just as dear as if I were with you. A thousand kisses and all
good wishes for my wife and the children. Hilel

The field of small red x’s embroidered on the cover of the book
references the phrase Tausend Küsse (A Thousand Kisses), from
which the piece takes its name.

With thanks to the Erner family whose collection features in this
work. Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

2023. Knitted blankets,100% combed cotton yarn, 80 x 136 cm, 150 x 250 cm 

These knitted blankets are based on telegrams and letters
in the Holocaust Centre North Archive. Often sent through
organisations like the Red Cross, these brief messages were
sometimes the only way for people imprisoned in concentration
camps to reach their loved ones.
Though limited in words, the messages carried deep feelings—of
warmth, hope, and solidarity. Faithfully magnified in the form of
knitted blankets, the artwork gives physical presence to these
fragile connections, with the aim of honouring the human need for
closeness in the face of separation and uncertainty.

MILLIONEN KÜSSE AUCH EUER BRUDER. Mama
With thanks to Michelle Green, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

English translation:
Dearest children. I’m very
worried, last message from
March. We’re all healthy. I
hope you are too. Message
from Dad: A million kisses.
Your brother too, Mum.

Telegram donated by second-generation Holocaust survivor, Michelle Green.
Michelle’s grandmother Gisella sent this telegram from Belgium to Michelle’s aunt, Aranka
in Harrogate. Aranka, along with Michelle’s mother, Lili, came to the UK to work in domestic
service in 1938-1939. Tragically, the family left behind, including Michelle’s grandparents,
Gisella and Josef, as well as her uncle Kurt, were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
Holocaust Centre North Archive, courtesy of Michelle Green.

Heaps of love kisses yours henry mendel
With thanks to Rachel Mendel, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

Hast du nicht Schnackerl?
With thanks to the the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

23.4.34
With thanks to the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

To wish you a prosperous life
With thanks to the Kubie family, courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.

Paperback publication, translations of archive letters with translator essay. Text excerpts installed on gallery windows, vinyl on glass.

Conversation Time is a collection of translations from letters
held in the Holocaust Centre North Archive, written between
1938-1945 by refugees from and victims of Nazi persecution. The
selection focuses on greetings, formulae, writing about writing –
the ordinary and repeated phrases that people used to express
themselves to friends and family members from whom they were
separated, not knowing when or if they would receive a reply.
Stories of displacement and persecution, anxiety and longing are
communicated indirectly, pressing through from behind the written
repetitions and everyday language visible to us through the letters’
dates.

An afterword relates the experience of the residency and the
challenges of translating these letters in the present day – how to
convey the ordinariness, what it means to be a human translator in an
age of machines, and how to let the resonances between the letters,
and between the letters and present day experiences, sound out.

With thanks to Elisabeth Bernheim, Michelle Green, Martin Hyman,
Joanna Leser, D. Rivlin, Trude Silman and the Anysz, Hartland, Kubie,
Leser, Schatzberger and Vernon families. Courtesy of Holocaust
Centre North Archive.

2025. Takeaway broadsides. A2 Print

This new work by writer-in-residence Nathalie Olah is presented
as a stack of takeaway broadsides—identical prints, each offering
a glimpse into her forthcoming book, to be announced later this
year. Her work offers a meditation on survival, aesthetics, and
belonging. Visitors are warmly invited to take a copy. As the stack
slowly disappears, the work traces a quiet choreography of care.

Rooted in the archive of Holocaust survivor Iby Knill, the text weaves
together historical reflection and philosophical inquiry. It draws
out the subtle but persistent connections between Iby’s handmade garments—scrapbooks of stitches, notes on fabric, acts of mending—and broader questions about who is granted the space
to be seen, remembered, and understood in their full humanity.

Olah writes from a position of inheritance. Her own background as
a descendant of a Romani man from East Hungary offers a way of
listening across the silences that characterise the archive. In this
crossing between Jewish and Romani memory, between personal
and collective loss, she does not seek resolution. Instead, she asks
how threads might be held together in the face of erasure.

In Iby’s story, aesthetics is presented as a method of survival: clothes
turned inside out, hems repaired in secret, dignity expressed in
style and gesture. Against the violence of classification—of being
ranked, measured, deformed—beauty re-emerges as something
unruly, a soft defiance and a refusal to disappear.

Olah’s book, the outcome of her Memorial Gestures residency,
will be announced later in 2025.

2025. Paperback publication, creative non-fiction 

Klutz is a dazzling, unsettling work of memoir, travel writing, and
cultural criticism that begins in the Holocaust Centre North
Archive in Huddersfield and leads to the haunted streets of Berlin.
Midway through a residency, Tom Hastings discovers that his
grandmother once lived just a short walk from Else Lubranczyk, a
Jewish seamstress whose letters—preserved in the archive—were
written to her daughter who fled Nazi Germany in 1939, a year
after Hastings’ own grandmother.

Else and her niece, Steffi Levy, were deported to Theresienstadt
in 1943. Following the traces left in Else’s letters—of ordinary life,
longing, recrimination, and attempts to escape—Hastings walks
the streets, visits the shops, and reads the memorial plaques that
now mark a vanished world.

What unfolds is a deeply personal journey: a reckoning with Jewish
inheritance, uneasy memory, and the crackdown on solidarity. Klutz
is about stumbling toward something and not getting there—and
finding something else instead.

With thanks to Barry Anysz whose collection features in this work.
Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


Buy the book & support Holocaust Centre North at:
https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop/

2024. Paperback publication, poetry 

A series of linked poems, in which Ben Barkow explores the
lives of his grandparents and their siblings and those of his
parents. By directly going up against Adorno’s famous dictum that
to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, he probes the
limits of representation in the context of the overwhelming need
to let the suffering of the victims speak. Implicitly he articulates
the haunting and haunted reality of a life lived in the long shadow
of the Holocaust.

With thanks to M., H., and B. Barkow.

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