One of the last survivors of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has appealed to authorities to recover fragments of tens of thousands of shoes belonging to murdered Holocaust victims, recently discovered in a forest in the area.
Manfred Goldberg, who was imprisoned as a teenager in Stutthof, 24 miles (38 km) east of Gdańsk, said he was “shocked and horrified” to hear of the remains eighty years after the owners of the shoes were forced to remove them. Before being gassed and burned.
Goldberg, 94, who was deported from their hometown of Kassel, Germany, along with other Jews, including his mother Rosa and brother Hermann, said he remembered seeing “mountains” of shoes in the camp.
“I remember the shoes. “I also remember being told that when Jews were selected to be gassed, they had to throw their shoes on a pile on the way to the gas chamber,” he said.
Goldberg, a British citizen, returned to the camp for the first time in 2017, near what is now the village of Sztutowo on Poland’s Baltic coast, to accompany the then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on a visit to the Stutthof museum. He came across the image of thousands of shoes collected in a glass cabinet.
Relating to: ‘People will never forget these shoes’: Fight to preserve the soles of Stutthof Nazi camp
But last month he was horrified to learn that only some of the prisoners’ shoes had been collected in the museum, while the rest had been abandoned in the forest where the Stutthof camp once stood. He said the failure to systematically uncover and cure them was “truly shocking and disrespectful”.
“This is inhumane. He displays complete indifference and disrespect. To throw them in a forest and let nature do its thing,” Goldberg said in a Zoom interview from his home in London, where he sought refuge at age 16 after the war.
Goldberg called on Polish authorities to uncover the shoes and suggested rebuilding the mountain he remembered seeing as a young prisoner.
“If these shoes were recovered and processed to be serviceable again and perhaps replaced exactly where they were found in the Stutthof camp, [it] “It would be an astonishing sight for people to see,” he said. “And I think that could give it additional international significance and influence.”
Built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later expanded to become an extermination camp primarily for Jews, Stutthof served as the leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, most notably Auschwitz.
Goldberg, who has been sharing his harrowing testimonies at schools and universities since 2004, uses a striking photograph in his PowerPoint presentation showing the towering pile of shoes received by a Red Army soldier who liberated the camp in June 1945.
“I’m including this to help people digest or understand the magnitude of the disaster we’re talking about,” he said. “Otherwise it is difficult to mentally grasp what the astronomical figures – the 6 million people killed in the Holocaust – actually represent.
“That’s why I’m asking people to look at so many shoes and consider that each pair probably represents a person who died in a gas chamber just minutes after their shoes were thrown onto this pile.”
Goldberg said that just as survivors like himself were “among the last witnesses” of the Holocaust, so were the shoes. At a time when antisemitism and Holocaust denial are on the rise, “every piece of evidence is vital,” he said.
“We see how the disappearance of this evidence contributes to people being able to say these events did not happen,” he said.
There was reaction from across the Jewish community to the discovery of the Stutthof shoes, following a campaign led by Gdańsk poet, musician and campaigner Grzegorz Kwiatkowski.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, has led calls for an international committee of experts to help Stutthof curators “deal with the material legacy of the Nazis’ crimes”.
“It makes the Holocaust personal, that’s what you remember. And if protecting the death camps was largely about making sure people didn’t forget, those shoes help you not forget,” he told Haaretz.
Michael Newman, chief executive of the UK Association for Jewish Refugees, described the Stutthof shoes as “poignant symbols of lost human lives”.
He said: “While they represent individual suffering, they also shed light on one of the darkest moments in living memory. At a time when antisemitism is on the rise in this country and globally, it is imperative that we teach the lessons and warnings of the Holocaust. “The unearthing of all the shoes is an inescapable reminder of the magnitude of the Holocaust and an honoring of the lives lost.”
Piotr Rypson, the newly appointed director of Poland’s ministry of culture and national heritage, announced funding of around 300,000 zlotys (£60,000) towards “additional archaeological discoveries” in the forest.
He said the ministry would also offer support for additional research into whether the shoes were part of the economic side of the Nazis’ killing machine.
When contacted by the Guardian, the museum’s spokesman, Łukasz Kępski, said: “We would be pleased to speak face to face with Mr. Goldberg and Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and hear their views and suggestions.”
He said the museum was waiting for funding from the culture ministry. He said notice boards had recently been erected in the forest informing visitors what to do if they came across shoe fragments.
The point, according to Goldberg, is to realize that shoes are valuable objects before it’s too late. “Leaving them in the mud of the forest would not be considered acceptable or dignified,” he said.