My grandfather Zigi said to remember, and I shall

Darren Richman

In the first in a three-part series about what he learned from his legendary grandfather Zigi Shipper, his grandson visits the Seeing Auschwitz exhibition in London and tells Jewish News those who were murdered must be remembered as real people, not numbers.

My grandfather, Zigi Shipper, survived Auschwitz and died on his 93rd birthday last month. Due to the nature of the man and his extraordinary impact on society, the funeral and shiva were not the typical scrabbling around for a minyan one might expect for a man whose contemporaries had, for the most part, predeceased him. The air of a state funeral was only increased by letters of condolence from King Charles and the Princess of Wales, the latter perhaps the most high-profile figure to enjoy Zigi’s penchant for flirting.

Shivas, like Test matches in days of old, have rest days. The Lord and Lord’s took days o and thus we were allowed a hiatus from pressing the flesh and sharing stories. I have always preferred a kind of immersion therapy approach to di cult times (the lockdown era saw me consume an unhealthy amount of post-apocalyptic fiction) and decided Friday would be the ideal time to attend the Seeing Auschwitz exhibition in London. I invited a friend and he told me he would treat himself by not going before my wife intervened and suggested I let myself o the hook too and go to the cinema (presumably to see something other than Schindler’s List). My wife is not Jewish and noticeably more clear-headed than I am. These two facts may or may not be related but, either way, I acquiesced.

Seeing Auschwitz is now in Johannesburg but I managed to catch it during its final week in London. I was immediately heartened by the number of gentiles in attendance.

Zigi almost never shared his testimony at Jewish schools, arguing that most Jews grow up with at least some awareness of the Holocaust and it was, inevitably, his voice in my head as I made my way through the space.

It was evident the presentation of the material had been carefully considered. There were no images of emaciated bodies, the kind of photographs that, like the words “six million”, are in danger of making us desensitised through overuse. Instead, we were presented with images captured by victims and perpetrators of everyday life at the hell on earth endured by my grandfather.

Every room brought fresh reminders of Zigi’s words. There was a tableau of the Nazi high command enjoying a weekend away.

I recalled my grandfather’s most rhetorical of questions: “How can somebody do those things by day then listen to music with his family at night?” There was video footage of a survivor, decades on, explaining he invariably breaks down in tears if he hears a child crying in a shopping mall. Zigi couldn’t abide a child in distress on the news or in his own life; if a grandchild was so much as o school with a cold, it was hidden from him.

Next to the pictures of the Nazis on holiday were photographs confiscated from prisoners on arrival depicting their lives before the war. A young woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Noah Baumbach film posed in front of a mirror, a mother hugged her newborn baby, a family enjoyed a day at the seaside. The Nazis had tried to dehumanise the victims entirely but the pictures were concrete proof these people were not simply numbers. It was more a ecting than any number of images of corpses.

The final piece of audio footage was the voice of a woman, clearly late in life. She spoke with none of the neutrality I have come to expect from survivors recounting the horrors they endured. Through tears, she explained her fears this would all be forgotten once the survivors had died out. She implored us to do what we could to ensure people remember.

For that voice and my grandfather’s and the silenced millions, that is what I am trying to do.