Almost half of the Jewish population of Belgium was murdered during the Holocaust. Complete families were wiped out, creating blind spots in the information available to reconstruct their stories in particular, but also certain aspects of the Belgian case in general. Personal documents of survivors and non-survivors thus become even more important to fill these Read More
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“They became my children too”: The Multi-layered meanings of family letters from the Jewish Maquis in France
Introduction On 6th June 1944, Robert Gamzon, the leader of the Jewish Scouts of France, wrote a letter to his wife, Denise Gamzon about a local underground scout group he’d visited. The group was situated near the southern French city of Castres, just across the Agout river from another team he had worked closely with Read More
The Lost Jews of Stettin: A Revealing Letter from 1942
For the past four years, I’ve been working with Harvard Law School’s extensive collection of documents from all 13 Nuremberg trials. My role is to create metadata for prosecution and defense exhibits (and source documents) so that future searchers will be able to find each item when the whole collection is online. The collection has Read More
Talking about Sexualised Violence: The Presentation of Rape and Male Power in an Oral-History Interview
The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is the biggest archive of oral-history interviews of Jews and other survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Trained volunteers have conducted more than 50,000 interviews from 1994 until today. The interviews were filmed and did not only focus on the period of the Holocaust Read More
EHRI in TEITOK
The Institute for Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL) put together an experimental interface for the EHRI digital editions, a corpus framework called TEITOK, as an alternative to the current interface in Omeka. Where the current interface of EHRI based is centered around documents, TEITOK is centered around texts. In many aspects, the TEITOK interface for Read More
Attempting to Flee: The Correspondence of Dr Ernst Neustadt
On 1st February 1946, Prof. J. B. Skemp, a Greek scholar and secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), an organisation designed to help academics at risk in occupied Europe, wrote a letter to Dr Ernst Neustadt addressed to 53 Belsize Park Gardens, London: ‘On going through our files, I Read More
Private Parcel Campaigns from Axis-allied Finland to the Ghettos of Nazi Occupied Poland
During the death march in 1945, Nena Szlezynger, a Polish-Jewish seventeen-year-old girl, was marching with the inmates of a Silesian labour camp in Neusalz an der Oder towards Dresden. She was wearing a blue winter coat with a fur collar, a valued possession she had been able to keep for over two years after being Read More
Rescue and Parenting through Correspondence
“I give you my treasure. I beg you – you are also a mother – to save my child. God will repay you for everything, and I will too (…). My child will bring you luck, you will see. I beg you, yourself a mother, to have mercy on my child (…).”1 Thus begins a Read More
Connecting the Records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission
“We were arrested at the Hungarian border and taken to the camp Stryi [a prisoner of war camp near Lviv in Ukraine], where we spent 12 days in prison. They brought a Jew to the camp, took everything he had, and gave him a rope to hang himself. The Germans didn’t pay attention to us Read More
More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching
The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Uninitiated researchers approaching Fortunoff’s collection, in particular undergraduate students tasked with using Read More
