Auschwitz Museum conserves shoes of tiny victims

Following a year of painstaking conservation work at the Auschwitz Museum Conservation Laboratories, more than 3 000 shoes of Jewish children murdered in Auschwitz have returned to display. This marks the success of the first phase of a historic restoration project that requires half a million dollars to reach its goal of restoring a total of 8 000 shoes.

In September last year, The Auschwitz Museum, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, and the International March of the Living joined forces, issuing an international call to raise funds. The fundraising campaign, “From Soul to Sole” resulted in thousands of people from the public and businesses, both in Israel and abroad, contributing thousands of dollars. By April, just a few months later, the first phase was ready to begin.

Says Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, the president and co-founder of the International March of the Living, “When we received the request from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation to preserve the shoes of children murdered in the camp, it was a moral obligation. We see the conservation of the shoes of these innocent children as an eternal testimony to the brutality of the Nazi regime as well as a significant educational initiative.”

South African businessman and chairperson of the Neishlos Foundation, Eitan Neishlos, provided the lead funding to kickstart the conservation project. Neishlos, a third-generation Holocaust survivor and philanthropist, was motivated not only to help preserve evidence but also to empower future generations by keeping the stories of the children alive.

“The shoes represent the lost memories, lost dreams, and lost aspirations of an entire generation,” says Neishlos. “The project is a vital testimony of our history.”

“Preserving the last remaining evidence of the children who were murdered at Auschwitz has even more meaning today as Jewish people around the world experience rampant antisemitism. We must all come together to make sure that no-one will be able to deny or distort the horrors the Jewish people endured in the Holocaust.”

It’s been 79 years since the liberation of the death camp in 1945, and with the passage of time, the shoes had become sadly deteriorated. The main problems facing conservators was the damage to the leather and its fragility, along with corrosion of the shoes’ metal parts. Meticulous conservation work to address these challenges entails that each shoe is treated on a case-by-case basis.

“Although they belong to the same group of objects and share a common part of history, they each have individual characteristics, constructed from similar materials but with distinct details that are significant in the conservation process. Each one is unique in that it contains traces of another person’s life. Therefore, conservation cannot be approached collectively, repetitively, or mechanically,” says expert Nel Jastrzębiowska, from the museum’s conservation laboratories.

The project is expected to last about two years, and will ensure the preservation of the children’s shoes for another 100 years.

Says Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, “The murder of more than 200 000 children at Auschwitz seems to represent the darkest area of history. This is where all the innocence, trust, helplessness, and goodness of children is juxtaposed with the ruthlessness of the German Nazi murderers. This is the apex of crimes of an ideology built on hatred. Very often, the only thing left of these children are the shoes. And just as every human step leaves a mark, so these shoes remain today the footprints of child victims.”

Like all the other personal items saved by the museum’s conservators, the tiny shoes of the youngest victims require preservation. Although the shoes are symbolic of the crimes perpetrated there, they evoke an even greater sense of responsibility.

Auschwitz survivor Arye Pinsker was present at the launch of the project at the conservation laboratory. Pinsker was a child when she was incarcerated at the death camp in 1944.

“When I stood in front of the mountain of shoes at the Auschwitz Memorial, holding the crumbling children’s shoes, I kept thinking how my twin sisters’ shoes are among them,” said Pinsker. She’s deeply moved to hear about the progress being made, and thanks the public for its involvement in preserving the evidence of Nazi crimes.

The 7 October attacks in Israel forced the Jewish people to face the worst massacre since the Holocaust and reignited its historical trauma.

“Our voices were silenced back then,” says Neishlos, “but today, with Israel, the Jewish world does have a voice and in the face of antisemitism, in the face of Holocaust denial, in the face of distortion of information, with both our past and present realities, I think evidence is key, and having a voice is key.”