Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has opened a new exhibition displaying hundreds of personal artifacts from Holocaust survivors — most of which have never before been seen by the public.

The exhibition, titled Living Memory, draws from Yad Vashem’s extensive collections center, a five-story archive that houses millions of documents and tens of thousands of items including photographs, artwork, testimonies, and personal belongings. According to the museum, the exhibition is intended to run indefinitely.

“This exhibition is really about memory — how we preserve it and transmit it, and how it shapes our identity and culture,” said Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, the exhibit’s chief curator. She added that the aim was to bring items out of storage and make them accessible to visitors.

Among the objects displayed is a wardrobe used by teenager Genia Sznajder to hide from Nazi forces during a roundup in Poland in 1941. A bayonet hole left by a German officer remains visible in the door. Also shown are sections of a hollow tree trunk in which Jakob Silberstein hid after escaping a death march, and a Shabbos leichter made from barbed wire by Azriel Yitzchak Shöner while imprisoned at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Additional artifacts include an original list compiled by Oskar Schindler naming approximately 1,100 Jews he saved, a handwritten Rosh Hashanah machzor created from memory by Chazzan Naftali Stern in the Wolfsberg labor camp, a picture book illustrating how a family hid during the war, and a spoon that stopped a bullet during an escape attempt from a deportation train.

A later section of the exhibit examines how survivors documented or interpreted their experiences. This includes a display dedicated to the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and several artistic works by survivors.

The opening of Living Memory coincides with Yad Vashem’s announcement that it has documented the names of five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The institution estimates that the remaining one million victims may never be fully identified, though ongoing technological advancements may uncover an additional 250,000 names.

The launch also comes amid broader efforts by Holocaust education institutions to update programming and outreach for younger generations. Yad Vashem has recently introduced additional installations, including an audiovisual presentation about prewar European Jewish life and an immersive children’s theater focusing on artifact-based stories.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)