Our new Reading Room exhibition, Words of Resistance, has just opened. The exhibition was created by the Youth Champion Board from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, young people committed to learning lessons from the past to help create a safer, better future. The HMDT Youth Champions came into The Wiener Library on 6 and 7 November to research and prepare the exhibition using Wiener Library archive material. They selected the exhibition topic to chime in with the HMDT’s theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2018, which is ‘The Power of Words’.

The exhibition reveals the ways that words were used as resistance by people who wanted to criticise perpetrator regimes and stand up against them. Words were used in a variety of ways; from a joke book written by a schoolgirl in 1930s Germany, to records produced in the Warsaw ghetto. In keeping with the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2018, these examples demonstrate The power of words through the documents and materials of everyday life.