Doll from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

 A sinister post, detailing a rag doll of a male concentration camp prisoner. The clothing is made from real prisoner's clothing.

The doll was given to the donor's (to the IWM Collection) step-grandfather, Gwyn Jones (British soldier) by former prisoners after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. 

Details of similar items made by liberated Belsen prisoners, and on occupational therapy at the camp in general.

They can be found in Letters from Belsen 1945: An Australian Nurse's Experiences with the Survivors of War by Muriel Knox Doherty, Judith Cornell, and R.Lynette Russell.

New Zealand Army berets #2

When Kayforce, the New Zealand military contribution to the Korean War, was mobilised, the khaki beret was reintroduced as the standard headdress for all of Kayforce.

KayForce khaki beret, Artillery

In 1955, the New Zealand Special Air Service was formed, and they adopted the British airborne maroon beret as their official headgear. Despite the British SAS adopting a beige sand-coloured beret in 1956, the NZSAS retained the maroon beret until 1986.

NZ SAS Beret

As a result of questions raised at the 29 November 1983 Army Dress Committee meeting on the design of berets, a study was initiated. This study resulted in a redesigned beret with less cloth in the crown and a cloth headband instead of the traditional leather headband.

NZ Regt/ RNZIR Rifle Green Beret

The New Zealand Army boldly moved on 16 August 1999 when CGS Major General Maurice Dodson issued a directive to adopt a “one army” beret. The directive aimed to create a sense of unity and pride among all soldiers and to simplify the number of coloured berets in the NZ Army. This resulted in the rifle green beret, previously reserved for the RNZSigs, becoming the standard beret for all officers and soldiers, except for the NZSAS, who retained their sand beret.

RNZMP Blue Beret

The transition to the “one army” beret was met with resistance, mirrored in 2001 when the United States Army moved to a “one army” beret for all soldiers, highlighting the powerful effect that symbols such as coloured berets can have on morale and unit pride.

New Zealand Army berets #1

Berets were first used as a headdress in the New Zealand military in 1938 when new uniforms for the Territorial forces were introduced, including a black beret for motorcyclists of the Light Machine Gun Platoons and dispatch riders.

Motorcyclists discontinued the black beret in February 1942 when the NZ Tank Brigade was granted permission to use the black beret as its official headdress.

Within the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF), The Divisional Cavalry in Egypt was the first to adopt the black beret. Later, black berets were issued to most of the 4th New Zealand Armoured Brigade personnel in November 1942. A year later, soldiers serving in the 22 Battalion in Italy were issued a khaki beret to replace their field service cap.

In the years following World War II, the New Zealand Army expanded the use of berets to various units. However, the reintroduction of the traditional lemon squeezer as the official headdress of the New Zealand Army in February 1949 marked the end of the widespread use of berets by the NZ Army, with only the RNZAC, NZWRAC, and RNZANS authorized to use the beret as their headdress.

Kiki

The story of Kiki the Truffle Pig.

Rural life, traditions, local produce, and the heritage of 1980s France, with the voice of André Dussolier.

You’ll hear the leaves crunching, your nose smelling the undergrowth and the black pearl, your eyes embracing this natural world... 

Hermione Burton

Hermione Burton (1925) was a Bedford based who painted her whole life but only exhibited twice.

Living with her American husband in the US, she became one of the first patients in the country to undergo what was then experimental open-heart surgery. Hermione survived, and it was during her recovery that she attended occupational therapy classes and began to paint in oils. These early compositions depicted the major events of her life and often included herself and her immediate family.

According to Hermione, it was Tom Jones singing Green Green Grass of Home on TV which prompted her to divorce her husband and leave America. She returned home to Aylesbury, and within six years had met and married her third husband, Frank Burton. The couple moved to Bedford in 1979, where she began to promote her paintings and portraits locally.

Hermione’s work was discovered by chance in a charity shop by Andy Holden and the remainder of her oeuvre was steadily tracked down, acquired and restored over the course of the next year.

Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl (1966) is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary.

From Die leere Mitte (The Empty Center)

Steyerl's work pushes the boundary of traditional video, often obscuring what is real beneath many layers of metaphors and satirical humor. Her work concerns topics of militarization, surveillance migration, the role of media in globalization, and the dissemination of images and the culture surrounding it.

Join the New Zealand Territorials:

Smart new uniforms, beret included and be paid to keep fit!
 

Léon Brunschvicg

Léon Brunschvicg (1869 –1944) was a French Idealist philosopher. He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Léon and Élie Halévy in 1893.

He was married to Cécile Kahn, a major campaigner for women's suffrage in France, with whom he had four children. While at the Sorbonne, Brunschvicg was the supervisor for Simone de Beauvoir's master's thesis.

Forced to leave his position at the Sorbonne by the Nazis, Brunschvicg fled to the south of France, where he died at the age of 74. While in hiding, he wrote studies of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal that were printed in Switzerland. He composed a manual of philosophy dedicated to his teenage granddaughter entitled Héritage de Mots, Héritage d'Idées (Legacy of Words, Legacy of Ideas) which was published posthumously after the liberation of France. His reinterpretation of Descartes has become the foundation for a new idealism.

Paul Montigny

Paul Montigny was credited with being one of the founders of the Central Pennsylvania Watchmakers and Clockmakers Guild and was co-founder of the Reading Classical Guitar Society.

Paul Montigny was an art and nature lover who was a dapper dresser in a beret and vintage clothes, driving around in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Montigny died in April, 2021.

Zaharia Cusnir

In the spring of 2016, film student Victor Galusca was exploring a sleepy village in his native Moldova when the 23-year-old noticed some photographic negatives in the rubble of an abandoned house.

The discarded pictures were the life’s work of Zaharia Cusnir, an unknown amateur photographer who died in 1993.

The villager had struggled professionally under the communist regime and battled alcoholism, yet he left behind some of the most brilliant portraits of rural life ever captured on film.

For the past three years, with the permission of the photographer’s daughter, who dismissed her father’s work as “garbage,”​ Galusca and his photography teacher have been cleaning and scanning the stunning find, which they released on a website in 2020.

Le Béret Français: Merino d’Arles Naturel .1, .2 & .3

Following the enormous success of the Merino d'Arles Naturel models by Le Béret Français, we decided to extend the range with more shades in natural, undyed colours: the lighter 'ash brown' and 'heather grey'. The same quality, the same comfort and the same price.

The Bérets Merino d'Arles are natural merino berets made of undyed, natural wool of brown merino sheep from the Arles region in France.

The Merinos d’Arles produce a light fleece of only 2 kg of very fine wool in the range between 20/21 micron with a length of 5/7cm. The particularity of the Merino d’Arles fibre is its curliness; no other wool has so many bows per centimeter. This allows very light products due to its bulkiness and lightweight.

Whereas most Merino sheep are bred with a focus on pure white fleece, the original colour of the wool are shades between milk-white to brown and grey. Le Béret Français uses the darkest brown Merino wool to be found.

Handmade in small batches in Bayonne, the capital of the French Basque Country.

Maria Alyokhina

Maria "Masha" Vladimirovna Alyokhina (1988) is a Russian political activist. She is a member of the anti-Putinist punk rock group Pussy Riot.

During her youth she hated the Russian education system and changed schools four times:

“They discourage people from thinking and asking questions, they only teach you to follow the rules and submit without explanation or, most importantly, reason... Obviously I didn’t like that. Who would?”

She studied journalism at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing in Moscow, where she participated in a sequence of literature workshops given by the poets Dmitry Vedenyapin and Alexey Kubrik.

On August 17, 2012, Alyokhina, together with fellow Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich, was convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. She has been recognized as a political prisoner by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Amnesty International named her a prisoner of conscience due to "the severity of the response of the Russian authorities."

In April 2022, Alyokhina fled Russia disguised as a delivery driver after officials announced she would be sentenced to time in a penal colony instead of remaining on house arrest. With assistance from friends, including Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, Alyokhina travelled through Belarus and Lithuania to reach Iceland.

In 2017, she published a memoir on her trial and time in prison, titled "Riot Days". A live performance based on the book which accompanies the text with live music and projected video has toured internationally.

Rana Sanaullah Haq

Rana Sanaullah Haq (c. 1961 - 2013), also known as Sanaullah Ranjay, was a Pakistani national from Sialkot, Punjab who was serving a life term in a jail in India for involvement in terror acts with the banned militant group Hizbul Mujahideen.

Before his incarceration, he was reportedly involved in Kashmir independence movement and two bombing incidents in Indian-administered Kashmir. On 3 May 2013, he was attacked by a former Indian soldier Vinod Kumar, who had been convicted of murder.

In Jammu and Kashmir, funeral prayers of Sanaullah were offered in absentia in different areas including the Jamia Masjid, Srinagar which was led by All Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman. Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, also showed concern over the incident stating that "the fact this is happening at all is a matter of great regret".

Sarah Jane Baker

Sarah Jane Baker (1969) is a British transgender rights activist, author and artist. She created the Trans Prisoner Alliance to support trans people in prison, and was the UK's longest-serving transgender prisoner at the time of her release.

She grew up in London in a large family and was neglected by her parents. She was imprisoned, initially for seven years, as a young offender for kidnapping and torturing her stepmother's brother, which was extended to a life sentence for the attempted murder of another inmate who, she said, had repeatedly attacked her. She escaped from prison in 2007 and was caught after three months.

Baker says she learned to read and write in prison; there she published two books and contributed to a third and created artwork that was exhibited after her release. She served 30 years in 29 different male prisons, during which time she came out as a trans woman in 2013 and cut off her own testicles with a razor blade in 2017. After her release in 2019, Baker became a transgender rights activist and announced her intention to stand as a political candidate.

Demir Pojani

These days, Albania is the fastest growing tourist destination in the world – going from one extreme to another after many decades of the strictest Stalinism under Enver Hoxha.

Demir Pojani is a former prisoner from the infamous Burrel Prison. Born on 12 August 1948 in Korça, he served 17 years in Burrell Prison, from 1973 to 1990.

While serving his sentence he was re-convicted two more times, once for beating a representative of the government and the second time for agitation and propaganda in prison.

Demir Pojani witnesses that when a prisoner died, their limbs, arms and legs were broken with a pickaxe and then placed in very small coffins. The bodies were buried in a place called Qershiza, after the name of a cherry tree that was there, 500-600 meters away from Burrel Prison.

After 1965, a stadium was built on the site and a bulldozer was used to clear the digs. After this time, the dead were buried elsewhere, behind the prison building.

He witnesses that during his time in prison 10-12 people may have died, among them 3-4 of his friends who committed suicide.

“They used to say to us: Here it is Burrel, where someone enters but never gets out!”

The Man in the Red Beret

Chess Master Jude Acers has set up his “World Chess Table” on Decatur Street in the New Orleans French Quarter since 1981, where he continues to play all comers for $5 a game. This is his story.

Jude Acers should be in the Chess Hall of Fame for a lifetime spent promoting the game of chess in ways nobody else can match.

 

Larry Vuckovich

Larry Vuckovich (1936) is an American jazz pianist from Yugoslavia.

Born in Kotor, a small Montenegrin coastal town in the former Yugoslavia, the pianist was classically trained as a child but was also drawn to the jazz he heard on Armed Forces Radio and Voice of America during World War II and the Communist regime that followed. After the war, Tito's communists took his home, including the family piano, and imprisoned his father and brother. Jazz came to symbolize freedom. In 1951, when he was 14, his family was granted political asylum in the United States, arriving in San Francisco.

Vuckovich worked with Philly Joe Jones in San Francisco at the Keystone Korner, where he was a resident pianist for five years. Later he worked for five years in New York City, where he performed at the Village Vanguard, Blue Note Jazz Club, Bradley's Zinno, West End, and others.

He returned to San Francisco for a long-term engagement from 1990 to 1997 as house pianist and music director of Club 36 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. He presented several West Coast Jazz Festival performances and served as music director of the Napa Valley Jazz Festival for six years.

Larry Vuckovich Day, December 8, was proclaimed in San Francisco on his birthday. Vuckovich received a B.A. in music at San Francisco State University, where he studied classical piano.

Aitor Inarra

Aitor Inarra (Anton Inarra) and Santiago Cabrera speaking about Hemingway and Gellhorn with Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen.

Gerald Hirigoyen

Born in Bayonne and raised in Biarritz, Gerald Hirigoyen moved to Paris to study pastry before coming to San Francisco to cook in classic French restaurants. He opened modern French bistros like Fringale and Pastis, prior to his marquee Piperade in 2002.

Along the way, Hirigoyen has become one of the most celebrated chefs in San Francisco, with accolades from the James Beard Foundation, Food & Wine, and The Chronicle, among many others.

Shimon Schwarzschild

Shimon Schwarzschild (1925 –2021) was a German-born American environmental activist. His work contributed to the establishment of a nature preserve in Assisi, Italy.

Schwarzschild's publications include a 1983 article in Audubon Magazine that first called international attention to the destruction of the birds of Assisi by hunting.

In 2020, Schwarzschild was finishing a film project called "Transcending Terror" about his relationship with the German town in which he grew up, Wertheim. He described the film as a documentary on "Loss, Opportunity and Redemption".

He died in New York on November 10, 2021, at the age of 95.