Holocaust Centre North: Huddersfield exhibition features huge blanket replica of final telegram to Harrogate before family members died at Auschwitz

Michelle, 70, has spent years educating people about the genocide and, now, she hopes that a giant blanket based on the final telegram sent by her grandmother, before she died at Auschwitz, will help to ensure people never forget the horrors of that time.

The woven blanket was created by artist Laura Fisher as part of an artists' residency at Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield with April Lin 林森 and Jordan Baseman, and will be on display there until July 27 as part of a free exhibition called Memorial Gestures. The three produced a number of works of art including textiles, video, sound, sculpture and prints for the exhibition, which was organised by centre director Alessandro Bucci, curated by Paula Kolar and funded by the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

"Holding the blanket felt like hugging the grandma I never met,” says Michelle. “I really didn't expect to feel such strong emotions.

"Growing up in Harrogate in what was a very small Jewish community, I experienced antisemitism and felt very different to other people. I always felt I had to fight my corner. I didn't have grandparents or cousins because they had been taken away from me. I felt the weight of history on my shoulders."

The cotton throw depicts the final Red Cross telegram sent by Michelle's grandmother Gisela from Belgian capital Brussels, where she was in hiding from the Nazis with her youngest child, Kurt.

Addressed to Michelle’s aunt Aranka, who had escaped Nazi-controlled Europe and was living with her sister Lili on Victoria Avenue in Harrogate, it is dated November 1943.

It was the final communication Lili and Aranka received before their family was betrayed by a Nazi informer and sent north to Camp Malines (also known as Mechelen), where Jews and Romani people were detained.

Translated from German, the telegram reads: “Dearest children, (I'm) very worried. Last message in March. Thank God we are well. Hope you are. Message from Papa (received). Millions of kisses also from your brother, Mama.”

Records show the mother and son, then aged 60 and 16, were detained at Camp Malines until April 1944. On the 14th of the month, they were herded onto a train which took them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Josef also died at Auschwitz, having first survived internment in three separate concentration camps.

Lili managed to escape to the UK in 1939, aged 21, after a spell working for the Viennese Resistance, helping to secure the release of Jewish men. Michelle says: “At least 10 men she managed to save, which was incredible, but it was getting very, very difficult and that's why she had to flee in spring 1939. Because it was made clear to her that her activities were very well known and if she didn't leave immediately she would be arrested. And on the day that she left Vienna they came for her, to her aunt’s flat, where she was staying. She just left perhaps an hour before that and it was literally an escape by the skin of her teeth.”

When she arrived in England, Lili joined her older sister Aranka, a former fashion designer, in London. Upon surviving the Blitz, the pair relocated to Harrogate, after a stranger told them it was "the most beautiful place in England."

The young sisters waited tables at Betty's tea rooms for a number of years before starting their own business in 1948 - a kosher hotel called the Manor Hotel - which they ran successfully along with Lili's husband Henry Pollock, Michelle’s father, until 1971.

Lili, a former fashion model with striking red hair, never hid the family tragedy from daughter Michelle, who grew up mourning the family she never knew.

The Schwarzs originally fled from their Austrian home in Vienna to Cologne in Germany after Kristallnacht on November 9 to 10, 1938. It was called the Night of Broken Glass because Nazi sympathisers burned down synagogues and smashed the windows of Jewish owned shops and homes.

The family later paid a guide to take them over the border to Belgium in search of what they thought was relative safety. But the country was soon occupied by the Nazis.

Speaking about the blanket, Michelle , who before retirement was head of learning support at Ashville College in Harrogate, says that it “dominates the room from floor to ceiling and it won't let you ignore it. It makes you think about a telegram that was once written and had so much love poured into it - a last vestige of hope that a family could one day be together again."

About five years ago Michelle - who formerly taught at schools including Allerton High in Leeds and Queen Ethelburga's near York - visited Auschwitz with her daughter Suzi and friend Arek Hersh, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Leeds.

They ended at the gas chambers, where visitors sang memorial prayers and the Hebrew names of family members, including those of Michelle’s grandparents and Kurt, were read out.

Michelle says: “That was very, very emotional, as you can imagine, to be there at the site but wonderful that we could say prayers, because they have no graves.”

Laura, its creator, says that when she first visited Holocaust Centre North, she was “initially overwhelmed and the scale of the tragedy felt incomprehensible”.

She adds: "I hope the work I have created as part of Memorial Gestures helps others to understand the depths of what was lost during the Holocaust-what was stolen from families whose lives were irrevocably changed.”

Alessandro Bucci, director of Holocaust Centre North, says that in an age of growing Holocaust denial, they face a serious challenge as educators.

"How do we ensure that the atrocities of the Nazi genocide are remembered and fully felt by future generations when we can no longer rely on living eyewitnesses?

"Holocaust Centre North’s Memorial Gestures exhibition has been produced in response to our growing collections of documentary evidence of Holocaust history, survivors’ testimony, and key national and international debates in this field.

“We believe that producing sensitive and well researched artistic responses are the best way to continue to engage future generations with the history and memory of the Holocaust and exploring the ways in which attention to the past can inspire creative action in the present.”

The exhibition is at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield until July 27. It is open Monday-Thursday 10am-5pm.