In 1942, a German-born Jew named Henry Wermuth attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Aware the Führer would be travelling by train past the Polish town of Bochnia, he sneaked out at night from the nearby Nazi labour camp where he had been working and piled logs and rocks onto the railway track. Yet the train ran without incident and Wermuth, whose involvement was never discovered, assumed German soldiers had found the obstruction and cleared the track. The war continued, eventually taking with it the lives of Wermuth’s mother, father and sister, an outcome that Wermuth had hoped he might have been able to avert. Years later, he was awarded a medal by the German government in recognition of his bravery.

That story, told by Wermuth’s daughter Ilana Metzger, features alongside several more like it on the actress Louisa Clein’s new podcast, Objects of the Holocaust, co-hosted with the historian Prof Tim Cole, which aims to celebrate positive stories of Holocaust survival through individual objects across generations.

One guest, the director Michael Attenborough, chooses a brochure from a production of A Chorus Line that his father Richard Attenborough had been directing in New York on the day Michael met, for the first time, the two Kindertransport girls his father’s family had taken in during the war.

Another, the Venezuelan author Ariana Neumann, discusses the ring that led her to the story of a non-Jewish woman, Zdeňka, who had smuggled in provisions to Neumann’s Jewish grandparents in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Before finding the ring among her father’s possessions, Neumann hadn’t even known her grandparents were Jewish. “For many second- or third-generation survivors, their family history is full of silences,” says Clein.

She herself has a particular fondness for one of the objects: a Chanukah candle fashioned out of a sardine tin by a survivor while he was being marched to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp towards the end of the war – chosen by his daughter. “Objects can be a way of filling in the gaps.”