‘In an age of Holocaust denial, this is extraordinary proof’: The one-woman archive of Belsen’s atrocities - Article from The Telegraph
If there is anyone who seeks to deny the enormity or depths of depravity of the Holocaust, they should perhaps pay a visit to the north London home of Hephzibah Rudofsky. There they will find a one-of-a-kind, one-woman archive of the realities of the Nazis’ attempts to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Among the more than 100 artefacts, photographs, papers and postcards are items carefully gathered from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany – which was liberated by British troops 80 years ago today, April 15. Several feature in Traces of Belsen, a new exhibition at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library.
Hephzibah’s mother, Zahava, and grandmother, Rosy Kanarek, both survived what the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, the first reporter inside the camp’s gates, described as “the world of a nightmare”. About 70,000 people, mostly Jews, did not – their naked and emaciated bodies were piled around the camp.
Zahava only discovered the trove of priceless possessions upon the death of Rosy in 2001, coming across a small suitcase at the back of a cupboard while clearing out her mother’s room in a home for the elderly in Israel.
Zahava Kohn, then Kanarek, grew up in Amsterdam and was just eight years old when she and her mother were transported to Bergen-Belsen Credit: Philip Coburn/Daily Mirror