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After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, they began segregating Jews in ghettos, usually in the most run-down area of a city. By mid-1941, nearly all Jews in occupied Poland had been forced into these overcrowded districts.

The artworks shown here explore a range of reactions to the Holocaust – from the deeply personal responses of survivors to the more documentary approach of official war artists recording the sights of Bergen-Belsen after its liberation in April 1945.

British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. Thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally ill people were packed together without food, water or basic sanitation. Many were suffering from typhus, dysentery and starvation.

On 2 October 1940, Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government of Poland, signed the order to officially create a Jewish district (ghetto) in Warsaw. It was to become the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. The Nazis also enslaved and killed other groups who they perceived as racially, biologically or ideologically inferior or dangerous. Hear seven survivors talk about and reflect on their experiences.

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people. Between 1933 and 1945, Jews were targeted for discrimination, segregation and extermination.

As the Allies advanced across Europe at the end of the Second World War, they came across concentration camps filled with sick and starving prisoners. The first major camp to be liberated was Majdanek near Lublin, Poland in July 1944.

One of the most memorable elements of the Holocaust Exhibition is the video testimony by survivors which accompanies visitors along the route. But what happened to the survivors after the Second World War? How did they rebuild their lives in the years that followed their release from Nazi persecution?  

In August 1945, a group of teenagers and younger children who had survived the concentration camps were flown to the UK by the RAF. The group of refugees arrived from Prague airport on Stirling bombers, touching down at the aerodrome at Crosby on Eden in Cumberland, where they began their long recuperation. 

Jan Imich was nine years old when the Second World War broke out. As a Jewish Pole, he was arrested and imprisoned in a series of concentration camps. During his time in one camp, he was forced to work at the crematorium, hauling coal to fuel the furnace.  

When The Holocaust Exhibition opened in June 2000 one reviewer wrote: ‘tireless searching for artefacts, relics and film has given us something which takes at least two hours to examine properly and will, I suspect, stay in the memory forever’.

Nearly 10,000 children fleeing persecution were brought to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1938 and 1939. Lord Alf Dubs and Sir Eric Reich were two of those children.

In 1938 and 1939, nearly 10,000 children fleeing the persecution of Jews in Greater Germany (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), were brought to Britain on the Kindertransport ('children’s transports').

The people who used the power of the written word to record what they saw happening during the Holocaust.