Auschwitz trousers go on BBC’s roadshow

I COULD NEVER SELL THEM. TO ME THAT WOULD BE BLOOD MONEY.

LONDON• In a carrier bag stowed at the top of her wardrobe, Sybil Van der Velde keeps a pair of trousers. They are made of a thick ersatz cloth, striped blue and a white that has slowly yellowed over the decades.

The bottoms are frayed and legs flecked with stains. Still, unmistakably, they are the uniform of the dreaded Auschwitz concentration camp. Clothes synonymous with the worst of humanity, and for Sybil’s husband Joe, the only possessions he had left in the world for four interminable years living in the shadow of the gas chambers.

When the camp was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, Joe was skin and bone, weighing less than 70 pounds despite being 5-foot-9.

When finally free, though, he decided to keep the trousers, turning a symbol of degradation into one celebrating his own survival. After moving to England and discovering he was the only one of his Dutch family of 22 to have survived the death camps, the trousers stayed with him. When he died in 1997, the garment passed to Sybil, his wife of 45 years.

She has looked after them ever since, loathing everything they stand for, yet unable to give them up. “I’ve never even washed them because I am scared they might disintegrate,” she says.

Next Sunday, Joe’s trousers will form part of a remarkable collection of objects from the Holocaust in a special edition of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. During filming, presenter Fiona Bruce interviewed dozens of people as part of a government effort to collect testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust.

The objects range from the poignant to the utterly chilling. One item inspected by the program’s experts is a Nazi board game from 1938 called “Jews Out.” In the game, players are urged to travel around the board “collecting” Jewish people.

And then there was Sybil, carrying Joe’s trousers, an item that the presenter says had a profound effect on her. “Holding them, I personally found those striped trousers … indelibly associated with horror and cruelty,” she says.

This year marks the 40th series of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, and the Holocaust program is believed to be the first time in its history where objects have not had a value placed on them. “It would have been entirely inappropriate and wrong,” Bruce says. “What value can you put on a child’s shirt with a yellow star on? What value can you put on Joe’s trousers?”

Sitting at the dining table in her flat in Edgware, north London, 87-year-old Sybil agrees. “I could never sell them,” she says. “To me that would be blood money.”