The Origins of the Central File The document presented in this post is one of the nearly 300.000 registration cards used by The Central Committee for the Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP) during the registration of the Holocaust survivors. The process of registration was carried out by the Records and Statistics Department Read More
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Fajga Fajnzylber: reconstructing life stories from dispersed sources
As an archival researcher at Yad Vashem, I respond to requests for information on the Holocaust victims from Poland. The rich archival resources available in Yad Vashem’s notwithstanding, it is not always possible to trace the fates of Jews here. I often strive to uncover previously unknown fragments of personal lives of the Holocaust victims Read More
Murdered on the Verge of Survival: Massacres in the Last Days of the Siege of Budapest, 1945
Part I: First-Hand Accounts Introduction The diverse and multilingual nature of Holocaust-era records is clearly exemplified in the case of the historical sources pertaining to the Holocaust in Hungary. Despite large-scale wartime damage and intentional destruction, millions of Holocaust-era archival records survived in Hungary. Due to the subsequent border changes, the documents on the Holocaust Read More
Jakub Leipzig Interview: Jewish Displacement in Italy through ITS Documents
Introduction The following report is one of approximately 30 million documents held in the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) – an extensive and unique collection that provides information about the fates of millions of refugees uprooted during World War II. In addition to the economic, political and social damages, World War II drastically Read More
Photographing refugee deportation: On visual representation of refugees
The photograph discussed in this blog post captures a dramatic moment during an attempted deportation of a group of Jews who escaped after the occupation of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. The series of photographs captured on March 30, 1939 at the Croydon airport close to London has attained an almost iconic character; their visual Read More
Elderly People in the Terezín Ghetto
Distribution of infirm people in the Terezín Ghetto This document from the Jewish Museum in Prague from September 5th 1942 details statistics about the “Distribution of infirm people in the ghetto”. Statistics on the elderly and so-called “infirm” people are quite common in the departments of the Jewish Self Administration. This document includes also a map of Read More
Daily Orders from the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto
Daily Orders from the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto During the Second World War the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto was one of the major sites of suffering and death for the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and several European countries including Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Luxemburg and others. Of approximately 150,000 prisoners, over 30,000 died there between 1941 and Read More
Letters from Children on the First Kindertransport
The following document is just one of a unique collection of 365 eyewitness testimonies gathered 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 The Wiener Library, was heading the Central Jewish Information Read More
Hans Frank – Letters from Exile
Correspondence of Hans Frank After the war, the Hansen family in Denmark found a suitcase with personal belongings of Hans Frank including correspondence and schoolbooks, brochures, annual school reports etc. In 1995, the Hansen family decided to donate the documents to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The collection includes 26 letters and postcards as well Read More
Testimony of Valerie Straussová
Testimony of Valerie Straussová and the Dokumentační akce (Documentation project) Within weeks of liberation, Valerie Straussová, the concentration and labour camp survivor, gave her first testimony about her imprisonment and persecution, as part of one of the documentation initiatives – Dokumentační akce (Dokumentation project). Immediately after the end of the war, similar projects were established Read More
