Written by Deborah Cardin, former Deputy Director of Programs and Development, Jewish Museum of Maryland

The stories emerge slowly from cardboard boxes, photo albums and suitcases. Spread out on tables, the subjects of the photos seem so familiar – families gathered in front of homes and on vacation, bar mitzvah and wedding celebrations and formal school and family portraits. Everyone is smiling, frozen in time, but the memories that accompany these family treasures make clear that these are no ordinary mementos.

The 91 stories presented here, and in the accompanying past exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM), put human faces on one of the most tragic chapters in modern history, the Holocaust. Each post is dedicated to a single story that has been told through the medium of collage.

JMM, in partnership with The Human Element Project, held a series of workshops where we invited Holocaust survivors and their families to bring photographs and documents that highlighted their experiences from before, during and after the Holocaust along with personal statements. The materials they brought were photocopied and integrated into collages on 10” x 10” canvasses that have been transformed into plaques installed on our gallery wall.

What do these 91 collages tell us?

One important lesson is that the experiences of our local community of Holocaust survivors are diverse. We counted more than a dozen countries of birth including Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, France, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria, Greece, Lithuania, Russia and Romania. Some collages document the stories of refugees whose families left Europe in the 1930s. Others experienced the horrors of confinement in camps and ghettos, while still others were hidden either alone as children or with other family members by generous and courageous non-Jews.

During the workshops we heard incredible and daring stories of escape, of survival in forests, of parents who made agonizing decisions to send their children on their own to safety and close calls that almost resulted in arrests. We also remembered the lives of many family members and friends who perished.

The collages also poignantly depict the true meaning of the term “survival.” As one participant stated, “Anyone who survived was a hero who truly defied the odds.”

As you read the stories that accompany each collage, this point is driven home again and again. Survival entailed resourcefulness. Whether that meant bribing prison guards to free family members imprisoned in concentration camps during Kristallnacht or navigating the many obstacles put in place by the Nazis to emigrate from Germany or even – perhaps most difficult of all – staying alive in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps, each person who lived through the Holocaust was an agent of his or her own survival. The many stories of survivors who married and had children in displaced camps after their lives were torn apart are further testimonies of their resilience and defiance.

We are grateful to the many individuals who made the Holocaust Memory Reconstruction Project possible. In particular, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to our partner, Dr. Lori Shocket and her husband Dr. Neal Shocket, and The Human Element Project, for bringing such an inspirational and creative project to our community. And we are so thankful to the workshop participants, the survivors and their families, for trusting us with their stories and treasures.