Bound Together By A Common Humanity
Learning from the Righteous is a Holocaust education charity that tackles racial hatred by highlighting the contemporary relevance of The Holocaust.
Visit Our Next Event
The launch of our new exhibition event
IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS
A daughter’s response to her father’s silence,
takes place at the Wiener Holocaust Library, London, on
Thursday 18th January - 6:30pm-8:00pm
The exhibition will be displayed at various venues throughout 2024.
Bill Powell
Bill Powell died in 1990; a loving husband, proud father and doting grandfather. He arrived in the UK fifty years earlier, as Wilhelm Pollak, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, having spent 10 months in Dachau and Buchenwald. He rarely spoke about his wartime experiences. The only tangible link to those tumultuous years was a wartime diary and some correspondence that he never shared, which was donated to The Wiener Holocaust Library after his death.
Jenny Stolzenberg
His daughter, the ceramicist Jenny Stolzenberg, was born just after the war and became the light that help her father emerge from the darkness. In his memory, driven to understand the trauma behind his silence, she created painstakingly accurate reproductions of footwear depicting the uniqueness of each victim of The Holocaust. She described it as the conversation they were never able to have. Before her untimely death, in 2016, the work was exhibited widely, and to high acclaim, including at the Imperial War Museum and Buchenwald Museum.
IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS
The new IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS exhibition enables this evocative expression of a daughter’s love to be displayed alongside the story her father could never share. By researching his archive, and accessing numerous original documents held in archives across the world, we have been able to construct a comprehensive account of what happened to Wilhelm, and the family he left behind in Vienna. During the evening Antony Lishak, who has researched and curated the exhibition, will be talking about how these discoveries add extra poignancy to Jenny’s memorial, and explain the trauma behind her father’s silence.