Artistic replicas of Holocaust victims’ shoes leave lasting impression

Sarah Sackman MP[Missing Credit]

Stolzenberg created the shoes in memory of her father, Bill Powell, a Holocaust survivor, who had come to the UK from Vienna as a Jewish refugee called Wilhelm Pollak. He died in 1990.

He had rarely spoken about his wartime experiences, which had included being incarcerated in Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, so In Their Footsteps was “the conversation they were never able to have”, said Stolzenberg.

Before her untimely death in 2016, the shoes – there are around 1,000 in total –  were exhibited worldwide to great acclaim, including in the museum at Buchenwald.

Sackman said: “The shoes highlight the individuality of the Shoah. Confronting the statistics, the numbers, the sheer horror of what took place is very difficult to contemplate. But when you bring it back to something as simple as a shoe, it personalises it; it makes it real for people. And each of those lives represented in those shoes is a terrible loss, but also a lesson to us.”

Holocaust survivor Lydia Tischler and a guest at the launch event[Missing Credit]

Saying that the rise in antisemitism both in the UK and worldwide was “a stark reminder that the work of Holocaust educators is far from finished”, the Minister of State for Courts and Legal Services said: “We can never take progress for granted - whilst antisemitism might morph or manifest itself in different guises, it never really went away. So, the responsibility falls on all of us to educate and to stand up to hate.”

After Stolzenberg’s death, the Holocaust education charity Learning from the Righteous became the custodians of the ceramic shoes, taking the exhibition into numerous schools to start conversations about the Holocaust. After learning about events that devastated the artist’s family, students make their own “shoes of memory”, which are then displayed in their school. Some of these are also on display at Portcullis House. 

Antony Lishak MBE, founder and chief educational consultant at Learning from the Righteous, said: “Students are asked to bring in a shoe [they] can tell a story about. Some bring their first pair of toddler shoes, or the shoes their mother wore at her wedding…It prepares them for encountering the rows of abandoned, stolen shoes in our exhibition…. A student once said to me: ‘It’s impossible to look at a shoe and not think about the person who wore it.’”

Antony Lishak MBE speaking at the reception[Missing Credit]

He added that they were going to expand the reach of the exhibition by using 3D printing technology to create replica shoes to be displayed at town halls, art centres and libraries across the UK.