First Call for Resistance to the Nazis in the Vilna Ghetto: “Let us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter”

On the cold night of 31 December 1941 a group of about 150 young Jews crowded in the small kitchen of Vilna Ghetto, in Straszuna Str. No.2. They pretended to be celebrating the New Year’s Eve, to distract the attention of their German and Lithuanian guards, who were in the process of getting drunk. The Read More

“Historical Meaning Beyond the Personal”: Survivor Agency and Mediation in the Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies Collection

“I am still so completely under the impression of your terrible suffering that every word that I could thank you with for this [report] seems inadequate….You have thus demonstrated that you have faced up to a moral task, which, as I hope, carries a reward in itself: You have helped to ensure that your experiences Read More

Messages from the Ghetto – Viennese transports to the General Government in early 1941

“It is impossible in just a few sentences to come close to being able to describe the individual tragic episodes of this transport. We ask that these people, who – so unprepared and without fault – have been forced out of civilisation, are not forgotten. Otherwise we will perish in misery. The food that we Read More

Witnessing the Eve of Destruction. Ernő Munkácsi’s “How It Happened”

Introduction This blog post is devoted to the key publication and original sources of one of the major eyewitness chroniclers of the Holocaust in Hungary.  In his book of 1947, Ernő Munkácsi, a leading official of the Jewish Congregation of Pest and the original chief secretary of the Hungarian Central Jewish Council, developed his interpretation of Read More

BeGrenzte Flucht: integrating Austrian and Czechoslovak documentation on 1938 refugees

The journalist Richard Bermann was one of the many Austrians threatened by the Nazi regime who tried in vain to flee on the night train to Czechoslovakia the night of the 11th March 1938. After approximately 180 Austrian refugees were turned back at the border, Bermann appealed via telegram to the Czechoslovakian president for the refugees Read More