“When we returned to Luxembourg, our native country, we got off the train and went to the school building. We had no identification and a person wrote down in our papers Jew and Polish because my parents came from Poland. They had come years ago but they had never taken Luxembourgish citizenship. […] They did Read More
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Pecunia Olet: Aryanizing Jewish Shops in Gödöllő, Hungary
Intro In March 1942, the town council of Gödöllő decided to cancel the rent of those Jewish shopkeepers whose shops were located on the ground floor of the city hall. During the preparations, the council ordered a drawing of the ground plan of the city hall, which served as a market area at that time. Read More
Georeferencing Service for Archives
Archives often have the wish to make their collections searchable and findable on a map like Google Maps or Open Street Map. This is a nice interface for users on which they can zoom in on a specific geographic location and see what collections are linked to it. This promise of a user friendly geographic 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
Recognising the ‘Anonymous’ Resistors: Everyday Heroes in Occupied Hungary
On 9th July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest and began work on a rescue project that would protect thousands of Hungarian Jews. His efforts have been the subject of many books, monuments and films, rightly recognizing his heroism. Yet, while his operation has become the main example of rescue in Hungary, many other individuals Read More
Transports from Mechelen
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportations to the East from the central assembly camp in Belgium for Jews, Roma and Sinti Kazerne Dossin started a series of online publications to mark these events. Around the date of departure of the convoy two personal stories per transport were written to lift the historical facts Read More
“Re-Germanization” and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle Camps: The Geography of Expulsion
“Extermination and assimilation were two sides of the same coin.”1 The author of this alarming phrase is one of the very few scholars who have written in English2 about the ‘re-Germanization” program run in part by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, an SS agency set up to take care of the needs of Read More
Using Named Entity Recognition to Enhance Access to a Museum Catalog
Introduction Digital technologies are successfully applied in cultural heritage projects supporting digitization of cultural objects, metadata creation, metadata maintenance, creation of digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research and many others. When we discuss archival digital textual content, some of the most imminent tasks are related to automatic metadata generation, searchability and preservation and these can Read More
