by One of the last survivors of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has appealed to the authorities to save thousands of shoes belonging to murdered Holocaust victims that were recently found in a forest at the site.
Manfred Goldberg, who was jailed as a teenager at Stutthof, 24 miles (38km) east of Gdańsk, said he was “heartbroken and disappointed” to hear the remains were there, eight years after the owners of the take them off. before being gassed and cremated.
Goldberg, 94, who was deported with other Jews including his mother, Rosa, and brother, Hermann, from their hometown of Kassel in Germany, said he remembered seeing “mountains” of shoes at the camp.
“I remember the shoes. I also remember being told that when Jews were chosen to be gassed, as they walked to the gas chamber, they had to throw their shoes on a pile,” he said.
In 2017, Goldberg, a British citizen, returned to the camp for the first time, near the village of Sztutowo on what is now Poland’s Baltic coast, to accompany the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on a museum visit Stutthof. He was faced with the sight of thousands of shoes gathered in a glass cabinet.
Related: ‘People would never forget these shoes’: the fight to preserve the Stutthof Nazi camp soles
But he was horrified to learn last month that only a small part of the prisoners’ shoes had been collected in the museum, the rest left in the forest where the Stutthof camp once stood. He said the failure to find and keep them systematically was “disgusting and disrespectful”.
“It’s inhumane. It shows complete indifference and disrespect. Just throw them into a forest and let nature do its work,” Goldberg said in an interview with Zoom from his home in London, the city where he found refuge at the age of 16 after the war.
Goldberg urged the Polish authorities to find the shoes and suggested recreating the mountain he remembered seeing as a teenager.
“If these shoes were recovered and worn for re-presentation, they might be replaced exactly where they were found in the Stutthof camp itself, [it] a great image that people would see,” he said. “And I think it could give it added international importance and influence.”
Built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners, Stutthof, which later grew into an extermination camp mainly for Jews, served as a collection point for leather repairs for all Nazi German concentration camps, until especially Auschwitz.
Goldberg, who has been sharing his adhesive evidence at schools and universities since 2004, uses a striking photograph in his PowerPoint presentation of a mound of elevated shoes built by a Red Army soldier after liberating the camp in June 1945.
“I include it to help people visualize or understand the scale of the disaster we’re talking about,” he said. “Otherwise it is difficult to get a mental grip on the astronomical figures – the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust – that they really represent.
“So I ask people to look at this amount of shoes and consider that each pair … represents one person who lost their life in a gas chamber, probably, minutes after they put their shoes on the this pile.”
Goldberg said that survivors like himself were “among the last witnesses” of the Holocaust, so were the shoes. In a time of growing anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, he said, “every piece of evidence is vital”.
“We see where erasing this evidence helps people to be able to say these things didn’t happen,” he said.
Responses to the discovery of Stutthof’s shoes, following a campaign led by Gdansk poet, musician and campaigner, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, came from all over the Jewish community.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, is leading calls for an international expert committee to be convened to help Stutthof’s detainees “deal with the material legacy of Nazi crimes”.
“He personifies the Holocaust, you remember him. And if preserving the death camps is to make sure people don’t forget, those shoes help you not to forget,” he told Haaretz.
Michael Newman, chief executive of the United Kingdom Jewish Refugee Association, called the Stutthof shoes “poignant symbols of a life lost”.
He said: “They personify individual suffering while shedding light on one of the darkest times in living memory. At this time of increasing anti-Semitism, in this country and around the world, it is imperative that we teach the lessons and warnings of the Holocaust. Revealing the full size of the shoes is an inescapable reminder of the enormity of the Holocaust and honors those who lost their lives.”
Piotr Rypson, newly appointed director of Poland’s ministry of culture and national heritage, has announced almost 300,000 złoty (£60,000) towards “further archaeological exploration” in the forest.
He said the ministry would also offer support for further research into the extent to which the shoes were part of the economic aspect of the Nazi killing machine.
When contacted by the Guardian, museum spokesman Łukasz Kępski said: “We were happy to speak personally with Mr. Goldberg and Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, to hear their insights and recommendations.”
He said the museum was waiting to receive funds from the Ministry of Culture. Notice boards telling visitors what to do if they come across pieces of a shoe have recently been put up in the forest, he said.
For Goldberg, it’s a matter of recognizing the shoes for what they’re worth before it’s too late. “It cannot be considered acceptable or honorable to leave them in the mud of the forest,” he said.
