Bringing letters to life

AN exhibition which displays a wide variety of personal correspondence written during the Holocaust has opened at the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM).

Signs of Life, co-curated by Roslyn Sugarman and Shannon Biederman, was launched last Tuesday by special guest Andrew Denton.

“It’s based on about 1000 letters and postcards in our own [SJM] collection. So it has a particular Sydney link,” Sugarman told The AJN, noting that the letters are largely donated by families who immigrated to Australia as a result of the war.

The exhibition has been in the works for a number of years; a process which saw the curators working with Holocaust survivors to translate the letters from their original European languages. “It gives us access into that period of time where we can, through the letters, learn about the personal stories … how [families] were forced apart, the anxiety of being separated, the anxiety of not hearing from each other,” Sugarman said.

She explained that the exhibition was originally intended to be more historically focused, looking at the postal system during the war, including how letters were sent, dispatched, and so forth. “But then just looking at what we had in the collection, we realised we had this amazing wealth of material, and [the exhibition] was driven very much by this material,” Sugarman said.

The letters exhibited include correspondence censored by the Red Cross, mail depicting the rare joy of reunification, and one wall of “Last letters” – in which the writers knew they would surely perish.

“It’s very emotive, and there are some very beautiful words. Especially the last letters, or letters when people knew they were writing to a child, where they knew this was going to be the last communication.

“Being a curator, you get to hold in your hands something that somebody has written where sometimes you can almost see smudge marks where tears might have fallen,” Sugarman said.

The exhibition, sponsored by the JCA Szlamek and Ester Lipman Memorial Endowment Fund, is expected to run at the SJM for at least one year.

“Based on what we’ve seen of it so far, and based on the comments we’ve had, I’m sure it’s going to be a most exciting and well-received exhibition within the community,” SJM CEO Norman Seligman said.

PHOEBE ROTH

Roslyn Sugarman (left) and Shannon Biederman, co-curators of the Signs of Life exhibition. Photo: Noel Kessel