The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and the United Nations Information Centre Pretoria invite you to their annual commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 78th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.

The commemoration will include formal remarks from foreign dignitaries, candle-lighting by Holocaust survivors, and a commemoration lecture: ‘Remembering the Holocaust through personal objects’. Today, museums and exhibitions across the world collect and display original artefacts from the Holocaust. At first glance, many appear to be rather unremarkable: a shoe, a suitcase, a pair of spectacles. But this is to overlook the fact that these seemingly everyday objects are among the last remnants of a murdered people, and each has its own unique story to tell.

Join Paul Salmons as he shares the stories of artefacts that have touched him most deeply, and asks what meanings they hold for us today?

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Paul Salmons specialises in difficult, challenging histories, exploring the continued relevance of the past in today’s complex world. He helped create the United Kingdom’s national Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum; co-founded the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London; and for 20 years played a leading role in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He is also the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first Gonda Fellow.

Paul is Chief Curator of Seeing Auschwitz (produced by Musealia for UNESCO and the United Nations), and co-curator of Musealia’s international award-winning Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. Recently he was consulting curator on two new permanent Holocaust exhibitions that opened in New York City and St Louis, Missouri, and he currently is working on a major new exhibition on the Berlin Wall.

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RSVP essential to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za