The Babi Yar tract in Kyiv is well-known as a site of murder and burial of Holocaust victims. During the Second World War, it was located on the outskirts of the city; now, it is part of the urban metropolis. In the Ukrainian intellectual community, Babi Yar has long been not only an object of Read More
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Unraveling “Sabotage Socks”: The Materiality of Nazi Concentration Camps in Sweden
There’s a hole in one of the socks near where the toes should be. Is that where an elderly female prisoner deliberately knitted a defect? Is it traces of use? Or is it just because the socks were knitted eighty years ago? Other than the hole, the socks have held up well. They are a Read More
Holocaust Studies in Ukrainian Academia in the 1990s-2020s: From Translations and Locality to Cultural and Philosophical Comprehension
The development of “witnessing theory”1 and “ego-documents”2 studies in Western academia has stimulated publications3 and online archives4 dedicated to Soviet Jewish life and different types of Jewish identity in post-Soviet countries. In the context of the contemporary relevance of ego-documents studies, I would like to offer my personal experience of studying the Holocaust and Jewish Read More
Saving Kyiv’s Jews During the Holocaust: The Story of Archpriest Oleksiy Hlaholyev and the Bondarenko Family
“My husband’s relatives sought advice and help from the family of Father Oleksiy Hlaholyev1 … Father Oleksiy went to intercede for me with Professor Ogloblin, who was the mayor at the time. Ogloblin knew our family. Eventually, he approached the German commandant about the matter. The commandant informed him that the issue of the Jews Read More
Mapping the German and Austrian population in Great Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War
When war was declared between Germany and the United Kingdom, September 3, 1939, all Germans and Austrians living in the UK were automatically classified as ‘enemy aliens’.1 For the first time in the historiography of this subject, this article maps where Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were resident in the United Kingdom Read More
Auditory Experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto
This article analyses the auditory experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants to understand what they reveal about life within the ghetto. Grounded in a vast array of personal testimonies, this research provides a more nuanced understanding of the ghetto auditory daily realities. The focus on the Warsaw Ghetto presents an opportunity to examine how its Read More
“I Loved Him as a Father”: The Silences of Hiding-Related Sexual Violence
Clara Vromen was born on September 27, 1931, in the Dutch city of Enschede to Jewish parents Abraham Vromen (b. unknown) and Minnie van Dam (b. 1907). Her father was a businessman and a member of the Zionist youth movement, who organized the hachsharot, the Palestine pioneering training programs, for German Jewish refugees in the Read More
Uncovering Local Jewish Histories: Hungarian Jewish Community History Books
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many Jews in Hungary returned to discover the destruction of their small communities. All Jews outside the capital city, Budapest, had been deported between April and July 1944. This came to approximately 440,000 people, many of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the few survivors Read More
An Excruciating Month: A History and Topography of the Pest Ghetto
“After Ilonka and I were shown to an apartment in a building, we stayed inside with one group of children, huddling because of the cold. […] I was aware of the scary situation we were in, but unlike Ilonka, I did not feel scared. In fact, I did not feel much of anything at all, Read More
Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust in Ukraine. A Brief Overview
When German troops occupied the city of Zvenigorodka (Cherkasy Oblast) on July 29, 1941, approximately 1,300 local Jews and refugees from the west lived there, which was just over ten percent of the total population. There were no spontaneous pogroms here; instead, Nazi occupiers forced all Jews to register and sent them to forced labor Read More
