In this blog post we introduce a prototype tool for OCRing and querying digitised historical documents, quod, which can be used for organising large collections of such documents.The work described represents a proof of concept, where the feasibility of the idea is demonstrated. Background The archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Read More
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The Haupt Family Documents
As an archival researcher at Yad Vashem, I often try to fill in the missing information from various sources. In the framework of the EHRI fellowship, I spent two weeks in the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in Warsaw, researching Holocaust-related materials. I wanted to find out what documents from the ŻIH archives Read More
Using Wikidata to build an authority list of Holocaust-era ghettos
Introduction In the spring of 2017, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI, work package 11) began a pilot project to link the EHRI ghettos vocabulary set with Wikidata. One of the primary objectives of work package 11 is to build an authoritative vocabulary of ghettos that can be used to describe the diverse Holocaust-related archival Read More
Engaging the Crowd with Holocaust Oral Testimonies
With over 22,000 hours of audio and video testimony in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection and available online, we face a search and discoverability problem. Visitors to the collection can only find certain interviews by sheer luck or by looking for a certain person’s name. Creating catalog information for the hours of testimony Read More
Visualising Methodology in The Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies’ Project
Introduction “We all have a duty to fulfil towards our past,” implored Dr Eva Reichmann, former Director of Research at The Wiener Library, in a short front-page appeal in the journal of Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain in 1954. Reichmann’s impassioned article launched the Library’s ambitious effort in the mid-1950s to record testimonies Read More
The 1948 Genocide-Convention: Raphael Lemkin’s struggle for the ‘law of the world’
On 9 December 1948 the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN). Getting the topic onto international agenda and the ratification of the document, however, were both difficult tasks. The Convention’s history goes back to a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, Read More
Death Blows Overhead: The Last Transports from Hungary, November 1944
Introduction In the morning of November 6, 1944, a column of civilians set off on the highway stretching westwards from Budapest to Vienna. All of them were Jews, mostly middle-aged and elderly women and men, forcibly mobilised by the Hungarian far-right Arrow Cross government to build fortifications on the eastern frontier of the collapsing Nazi Read More
Forced Labourers and the Water Works Camps in the Lublin District
Depicting non-industrial forced labour: The example of water works camps in the Lublin district The photograph depicts a rarely discussed topic in Holocaust historiography: The daily life of Jewish forced labourers in early water works camps (Wasserwirtschaftslager) in the Lublin District. The series of photographs from the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance at Read More
Online Finding Aid on Nazi Camp History
An old finding aid regarding general information on incarceration and persecution sites of the Nazi Regime was published on the EHRI portal in May 2016. The physical finding aid – a card index – had been gradually compiled between the years 1970 and 1982 and had served primarily as a search tool for ITS staff Read More
Card File of the Jewish Population in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia
Preserved remnants of registration card files of Jews in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia open important questions of the state of Holocaust documentation as well as of the deployment of modern technology in registering and deporting European Jews. This post analyses the history and structure of the WWII central card file held today at the Read More
