From Anita Winter and Rea Dalipi, Gamaraal Foundation
“It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” This is what Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi wrote about the tragedy and the break with civilization that the Holocaust represents. Holocaust survivors know that history can repeat itself, because they have seen with their own eyes what people are capable of doing.
As a daughter of Jewish Holocaust refugees, who were persecuted during the Holocaust, and as Swiss citizen, Anita Winter, president and founder of the Gamaraal Foundation, considers it a duty and obligation to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust, and to constantly confront ourselves with it. And the best way to keep a memory alive is having survivors tell their own personal life story. This is the message that “The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors” exhibition aims to convey to the public. The exhibition is organised by the Gamaraal foundation, where Holocaust survivors talk about their lives. Just in time for the International Holocaust Day on January 27th, the exhibition can be now visited online.
The exhibition website, among the 23 languages, is also available in the Albanian language. The Albanian translation is not there by accident. Albania was the only country in the world to have more jews after the World War II than before it. It was a safe home for jews, at times where being a jew was basically equivalent to death. Some wonder why it is so. The answer to this is grounded in Besa, a code of honour, dating back to the Middle Ages. It starts with a paragraph saying that “the house of the Albanian belongs to the friend and god”. Whoever knocked at Albanians’ doors looking for shelter was considered a friend, and they were provided assistance because the biggest form of dishonour was betraying someone asking for help. Albania is today part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and their doors, just as before, remain open to any friend looking for support.
© Gamaraal Foundation
An Encounter with the Last Holocaust Survivors
We find ourselves at a defining moment concerning the transmission of Holocaust, since there are only a few witnesses of this terrible genocide remaining among us. The portraits and stories of Holocaust survivors stand at the center of the online exhibition; they give a personal dimension to Holocaust history and preserve it for future generations. Those portrayed here come from various European countries and today live in the German-, the French- or the Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. They represent all of the people that have survived the Holocaust and found a new homeland in Switzerland.
The poignant portraits show the faces of people, whose human dignity was once denied. These are faces that are marked by life stories. We learn glimpses of these life stories in the moving films. These are stories of survival, as well as stories of life after the Holocaust. Those portrayed here tell us how they were stripped of their rights and humiliated, how they survived the Holocaust and how they have continued to live afterwards. They also tell us how trauma and deep sorrow still inhabit Holocaust survivors at an advanced age.
In a kind of virtual space, visitors can move from portrait to portrait using their web browser. The arrow keys and the mouse help. Behind the link “Watch my testimony” you will find video clips with personal reports from the people portrayed.
The 89-year-old Nina Weil looks down from the big black and white seriously, but with alert eyes. In the exhibition one learns how drastic the tattooing of the number in the Auschwitz concentration camp was for her as a child. “I had lost the name, I was just a number,” she later said. The number on her arm can still be seen: 71978. She survived the notorious concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. However, her mother died of exhaustion at the age of 38, when Nina Weil was just twelve years old.
© Gamaraal Foundation
For the Youth and Future Generations
The exhibition The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors demonstrates through biographies and portraits what can result from anti-Semitism, which is newly ascendant in several countries. Important moments for the foundation were marked by the first showing of the exhibition in the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, as well as its display in the United Nations main building in New York. After the exhibition has been physically on view in several other places around the world since 2018 – including Washington, Singapore, Shanghai, Israel, Luxembourg, Switzerland and also here in Albania – we are pleased that despite the Covid-19 crisis, the important messages get transmitted to the people. Because of the pandemic, planned exhibitions had to be canceled, but now even more people can see the exhibition online. “Schools can benefit from our online exhibition; they may be going through the Holocaust right now, but because of Coronavirus they cannot make trips to Holocaust memorial sites, or exhibitions, etc. Then the teachers can work with our website.”
The GAMARAAL Foundation was founded in 2014 with the objective of giving support to the remaining Holocaust survivors, as well as raise awareness among pupils through various educational projects. The founder Mrs. Winter is actively committed to human rights. She participates as official representative of the Jewish humanitarian organization B’nai B’rith International and the Coordinating Board of Jewish Organisations CBJO in the discussions of the UN Human Rights Council. The Gamaraal Foundation has received together with the Archives of Contemporary History at the ETH Zürich the Dr. Kurt Bigler Award 2018 for Excellency in Holocaust education.
“I would like to wholeheartedly thank all those who were portrayed: thank you for the strength to tell your life stories, and to share with us your experiences and memories, which can sometimes barely be expressed with words”, Mrs. Winter says
In this photo, Anita Winter- Founder and President of the Board, Gamaraal Foundation
Watch the online exhibition: https://gamaraal.com/exhibition/
Exhibition website: https://www.last-swiss-holocaust-survivors.ch
