Browse our exhibitions

During the Holocaust, Jewish partisan groups and underground resistance networks launched attacks, sabotage operations and rescue missions.

Our exhibition, Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti, draws upon The Wiener Holocaust Library's collections of material on the genocide to uncover the story of this little-known aspect of Nazi persecution. Our archives hold a wide range of relevant materials including eye-witness accounts, photographs, documents and books.

The Wiener Library’s summer exhibition showcases the remarkable work of German Jewish photographer Gerty (Gertrud) Simon, and features many of her original prints from the 1920s and 1930s. Simon was a once-prominent photographer who captured many important political and artistic figures in Weimar Berlin, including Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann and Albert Einstein. In the 1930s, as a refugee from Nazism in Britain, Simon rapidly re-established her studio, and portrayed many significant individuals there, such as Sir Kenneth Clark, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Aneurin Bevan.

During the Holocaust, in camps and in ghettos, the incarcerated documented the facts and gathered evidence. After the war, in a variety of countries and organisations, this work continued, and attention turned towards prosecution of perpetrators and towards prevention of future genocides. The collection of evidence and research was also an important aspect of the huge post-war task of tracing the missing after the Holocaust, and has been a feature of the work of commemorative institutions ever since.

Through the eyewitness accounts gathered shortly after Kristallnacht, the exhibition examines responses to this unprecedented, nation-wide campaign of violence. Never-before-seen documents from the Library’s collection demonstrate German and Austrian Jews’ desperate attempts to flee, in many cases as refugees to Britain.

The Wiener Library’s summer 2018 exhibition explores the history and context of an exhibition held in 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London entitled Twentieth Century German Art. 2018 marks the eightieth anniversary of this exhibition, which was the most prominent international response to the Nazi campaign against ‘degenerate’ art. It remains the largest display of twentieth-century German art ever staged in Britain. The show featured over three hundred examples of modern German art, by exactly those artists who had faced persecution in Germany: the exhibition in London in 1938 was an attempt to defend them and their work on a world stage.

Co-curated with Professor Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London), this exhibition tells the remarkable, little-known story of the agonising search for the missing after the Holocaust. Drawing upon The Wiener Library’s family document collections and its digital copy of the ITS archive, one of the largest document collections related to the Holocaust in the world, the exhibition considers the legacy of the search for descendants of those affected by World War II, and the impact of fates unknown.

During the German occupation of the Channel Islands 1940–1945, many thousands of people were persecuted, including slave labourers, political prisoners and Jews. Their story has been largely omitted from a British narrative of ‘standing alone’ against Nazism and celebrations of British victory over Germany.

Medical experiments conducted on human beings during the Nazi period are often associated with notorious SS doctors and concentration camps. The experiments have been described as ‘pseudo-science’ and viewed as a precursor to the killing centres of the Holocaust.

Originally from Warsaw, artist and illustrator Franciszka Themerson found herself alone in London during the war, separated from her husband, writer and film-maker Stefan Themerson, who was stranded in southern France, and the rest of her family, trapped inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Armenian world was shattered by the 1915 genocide. Not only were hundreds of thousands of lives lost but entire families across multiple generations were permanently forced from their homes. The narrative threads that connected them to their own past and homelands were often severed forever.

The Wiener Library’s current temporary exhibition explores the Nazi labour and extermination camps of Treblinka using the ground-breaking research of Staffordshire University archaeologist Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls and in artistic responses to the topic curated by Michael Branthwaite.

The exhibition focuses on our outstanding collections relating to the post-war relief and rehabilitation work of the Jewish Relief Unit in Bergen-Belsen and elsewhere. The relatively little-known history of the JRU dates back to 1943, when it was founded by a group of Jewish volunteers to provide aid to Holocaust survivors and refugees as the Nazis went into retreat.

The Jewish soldiers whose stories are told in this exhibition had remarkable experiences, performing surgery in Gallipoli, working with casualty dogs in the Ardennes, and setting up book stores on the Eastern Front.

The story of the Kitchener camp is not as well known as that of the Kindertransport, but it is in many ways equally remarkable.

This exhibition showcases five of David Graham’s remarkable 2009 photo portraits documenting the lives and struggles of young Rwandans dealing with homelessness, often resulting from the loss of family members in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

‘Hans Gál – Music in Exile’ explores the life and music of the Austrian-British composer Hans Gál, who was forced to emigrate from Vienna to Britain in 1938 as a result of Nazi persecution of Jewish musicians.

In 2013, the remaining ‘Kinder’ are celebrating the 75th anniversary of their arrival in the United Kingdom. ‘Child Refugees: Five Portraits from the Kindertransport’ takes a fresh look at this significant humanitarian effort.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg's birth, The Wiener Library is hosting an exhibition that tells four extraordinary stories of rescue during the Holocaust.

To mark the 70th Anniversary of the Declaration, the Library joined up with The Guardian and The Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, to put on a special exhibition at The Guardian News & Media, King's Place.

This exhibition exposed the astonishing and frightening skill of the Nazis as manipulators of public opinion, while also highlighting the stories of people who resisted Nazi views of the ideal sporting body.

A temporary exhibition to mark International Women's Day featuring artist Kay Goodridge.

This project began when we advertised a call for submissions of book art works under the theme of “Displaced”. We were looking for artistic responses to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the Wiener Library is delighted to feature the work 1984: Jis tann lãgé soee jãné by photographer Gauri Gill.

Into the Light, The Joy of Painting features artwork by Holocaust survivors and refugees from Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors Centre (HSC).

Our new digital map will give everybody the opportunity to browse and search a wide selection of The Wiener Library's collections of refugee family papers as well as extensive clips from the AJR Refugee Voices audio-visual archive.

The Wiener Library in cooperation with Bergen-Belsen Memorial and the SPECS research group, are offering a unique installation for display to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

This exhibition highlights documents, photographs and other resources from the Library’s collections that challenge commonly held assumptions regarding British responses to the Holocaust, such as that the British government entered the war to save the Jews.