LONDON — It is a picture that speaks a thousand words: An image taken by an aid agency shows three generations of Holocaust survivors — and the markups to prepare it for publication that crop out the elderly grandmother.

“Eldercide: Older Jews and the Holocaust,” a new exhibition at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, explores the largely untold story of older Jews during the Shoah, examining stories of flight, persecution and survival through rare photographs, personal stories and objects. The exhibit runs through April 30.

In Britain, the stories of Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis on the famous “Kindertransport” are well known. But the plight of the elderly relatives they left behind is much less familiar.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s — by which time those older survivors had long since died — that researchers began to systematically record the audiovisual testimony of survivors. Organized programs for survivors to speak in schools or on Holocaust Memorial Day — instituted in the UK in 2001 — also came too late to capture their experiences.

“Our stories of the Holocaust are somewhat skewed by survivors today because they were children, and so they’re talking about their parents’ experiences or remembering their grandparents, but we don’t necessarily have those voices of elderly survivors,” says Christine Schmidt, acting co-director of the library.

The experience of the generation born in the wake of the Industrial Revolution is both unique and difficult to piece together. Some of those featured in the exhibition were born before the Russian Empire abolished serfdom, others in the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War and the unification of Germany.

“It stretches your mind from the 20th century into the 19th,” says Schmidt. “It allows you to think of a longer timeline for people who were impacted by the Holocaust.”

Most older Jews who were deported to the camps did not come out alive. The Nazis deemed the elderly, like children, “not fit for work,” meaning they were often selected first for transports and then for the gas chambers.

In the first liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in the summer of 1942, for instance, the elderly, children and the sick were singled out as “unproductive” and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Within months, only a few hundred elderly ghetto residents — some of whom tried to disguise their age, present themselves as fit for work, or hide in cellars or attics — remained.

“The exhibition tries to strike a balance between the particular vulnerability of the elderly due to age and the physical challenges of the persecution they faced,” says Schmidt, “but also their agency, and the fact that there were people who managed to escape and there were people who survived.”

It was, the exhibition notes, especially difficult for elderly Jews to flee Poland. Some chose to stay, believing........

© The Times of Israel