“[T]he moment on 10 September 1942 we stepped out of the train in Aalten, I thought: ‘Is the war still going on? Does the persecution of the Jews still exist? Here, everything is so quiet and so different from what we have become used to recently. Here, we may be able to become even more Read More
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Correspondence Across Ghetto Walls
Officially censored postcards addressed from or to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, are items that are well-represented in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Correspondence, which was the only option inmates had of communicating with the outside world, was highly controlled and supervised by the SS command. At different times in the ghetto’s history, Read More
The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen
Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had been inaugurated in 1995 at the former SS-Sammellager Mecheln, better known as the Dossin barracks, Read More
Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to a given person. There could be several reasons for that – the documents are spread Read More
Lotte Porges – The Story Behind the Photograph
Between the years 1942–1945, three different staged films were created in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Ghetto. Only a few short shots or fragments of the original versions have been preserved.[1] The most famous of these became the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet,[2] which became known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Read More
Cooperation of Rescue Organisations in Vienna: An Eyewitness Report
Introduction The following document is part of The Wiener Library’s collection entitled ‘Eyewitness reports regarding the November Pogrom’, consisting of 365 eyewitness testimonies collected in the days, weeks, and months following the November Pogrom of 1938, alternatively known as ‘Kristallnacht’ or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. At the time, Alfred Wiener, the German-Jewish founder of Read More
quod: A Tool for Querying and Organising Digitised Historical Documents
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
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
