(JEWISH GROUP) Elderly Jews Were Among the Most Likely to Die in the Holocaust. Why Has History Forgotten About....

Elderly Jews Were Among the Most Likely to Die in the Holocaust. Why Has History Forgotten About the Genocide’s Oldest Victims?

In narratives of the Holocaust, older Jews tend to be relegated to the margins, overlooked in favor of younger figures like Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who was 27 when World War II broke out in 1939, and teenage diarist Anne Frank. “Frank is the quintessential story of a child during the Holocaust, but there isn’t the kind of equivalent awareness or even research being done on older victims,” says Christine E. Schmidt, deputy director and head of research at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

Like children, the elderly were among the groups most likely to die in the Holocaust. Deemed unfit to work, most older Jews were murdered immediately upon arrival at Nazi death and concentration camps. Yet in the aftermath of World War II, the few elderly Jews who’d survived received different treatment from their much younger counterparts.

“The comments that [aid agencies made] about the elderly … [were] quite condescending toward the older victims,” says Dan Stone, director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. While seeking help from the public, Stone adds, these charities essentially said, “The children have this bright future, if you will support them. The elderly have nothing and no hope. They just need to be helped to live out their days before they pass away.”

“Eldercide: Older Jews and the Holocaust,” a new exhibition at the London library, shines a spotlight on this oft-forgotten demographic. Co-curated by Schmidt and Stone, the show draws on photographs, documents, rare recordings and family heirlooms to illustrate the richness of its subjects’ lives, which started in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution and, for many, ended in Nazi gas chambers. “Eldercide” also examines the unique predicaments that older Jews faced both during and after the war.

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