The Huddersfield-based Holocaust Centre North is encouraging visitors to think differently about its exhibits through a new audio guide to its permanent collection.

Whereas conventional gallery guides focus on objects on display, the centre’s version reflects on the losses felt by Shoah survivors.

Titled Encountering Survival, it features interviews with survivors and their families, exploring memories of former homes and possessions — and even familiar smells — connecting to the centre’s displays recounting persecution, forced migration and trauma.

As well as voices from its archives, there are new interviews with Leeds-based survivors and their relatives.

Among them is Trude Silman, 93, who talks about a painting in an ornate frame that hung in her childhood home in Bratislava.

The painting was hidden on a farm to prevent it being looted by Nazi soldiers. In a positive outcome, it was rescued after the war and now hangs in the Harrogate home of her daughter Judith.

Liesel Carter shares memories of leaving Germany on a boat at the age of four with her favourite teddy bear, the only toy she was able to take with her. The teddy was later destroyed by cousins who considered her too old to play with soft toys.

Suzanne Ripton vividly recalls the smell of her grandfather’s long white beard as she gave him a final hug before fleeing France with her mother.

The guide was created as part of the Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Project, led by the Imperial War Museum and supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Its co-creator, Linda O Keeffe, explained that “to empathise with someone’s pain in war, you just have to understand a tiny moment of what it can do to your life.

“When you hear someone describe the smell of their grandad’s beard, knowing it was the last time they would see them, you understand more about what it would be like to look at a person you love and have to say goodbye for the last time.”

Centre director Alessandro Bucci said that although its collection exceeded 6,000 items, “we are aware of so much that cannot be preserved for posterity because it was lost, destroyed, stolen or left behind.

“The audio guide focuses on memories, feelings of a mood at a certain time, the sound or smell of something — the stories behind what is absent.

“The nature of our topic can be difficult for some visitors to process in one sitting.

“We wanted our audio guide to be something that visitors can take home with them and listen to in their own time.”