Goldberg’s experience was heartbreaking. His younger brother Herman, aged only nine, was considered too young to work as slave labour, and was permitted to stay behind in the camp. Goldberg and his mother returned one day to find that Herman had been taken away by the SS. They never saw him again. “I can still hear my mother’s wails at having lost her little boy,” Goldberg said.

These testimonies were interspersed with film of the survivors – Goldberg, Helen Aronson, Lily Ebert, Arek Hersh, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Rachel Levy and Zigi Shipper – sitting for their portraits. The artists were also interviewed, and spoke of feeling a great sense of responsibility. But there were lighter moments, as when Ebert – whose age was not mentioned here, but she is a sprightly 98 years old – jokingly asked to be painted as her 18-year-old self. She was determined, she told her portraitist, to be painted smiling. As with all of the others, she was possessed of an indomitable spirit.

The finished portraits captured something of that essence.