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100,000 glasses line the floor at the Town Hall

Pairs of glasses donated by the public and celebrities including Tony Blair, Yoko Ono and Daniel Radcliffe make up a unique work of art at Liverpool Town Hall.

100,000 pairs of glasses have been donated for the exhibition which is part of a series event leading up to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, for which Liverpool is the UK host city.

The pairs of glasses have been laid out in the main ballroom at Liverpool Town Hall, next to a pair of rail tracks which represent the tracks which brought hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths at Auschwitz.

A black and white photograph of hundreds of pairs of victims glasses at Auschwitz was one of the striking images of the holocaust to emerge after World War II.

Liverpool is hoping to break the world record for the biggest collection of glasses. It currently stands at 5000.

“It’s an amazing sight,” says Lord Mayor of Liverpool Cllr Paul Clark.

“It is beautifully created and the great thing is so many people have had a hand in it.”

Individual participation

The RESPECtacles project intends to spread a message that individuals can play a part in genocide prevention by showing respect for other human beings.

Celebrities have donated glasses

Inge Goldrein who as a young child escaped from Germany to Liverpool says she was touched by the exhibition, “I was quite overwhelmed when I saw it. I’ve been very fortunate in that Liverpool welcomed me. My adoptive family welcomed me and treated me as their own and I’ve really become a part of Liverpool.”

“I came to Liverpool on the Kindertransport which was an organisation providing transport to 10,000 children.

“The British government had ordained that they were going to allow these 10,000 children in to the country. It was a great step forward for those in need of a place of refuge.

“It was a wonderful deed on behalf of this country because all the other countries in Europe and elsewhere stepped back and said ‘No we don’t need anybody.’

“The family I left behind don’t exist anymore. My father was deported to Minsk, that’s a place where there was ‘killing fields’, and he was one of those who didn’t survive.”