“We spend our lives living in darkness, in cold, and often in hunger.” – Jewish Entreaties to Slovak President Jozef Tiso During the Holocaust

Thousands of Jews throughout Europe, facing a shrinking universe of options and increasingly desperate circumstances, wrote to the representatives of the very governments that were persecuting them to ask for clemency from anti-Semitic measures during the Holocaust. They employed a variety of rhetorical strategies in their appeals, hoping that their words would be sufficiently convincing Read More

Polish-Jewish Industrialists and Their Links to Loved Ones: An Analysis of the Correspondence of Dr Joseph Thon

On the morning of the 8th January 1959, Dr Joseph Thon passed away in the French Hospital, New York aged fifty-five with no spouse or children after a short illness.1 Born Joseph Teitelbaum in December 1903 in Żurawno, Poland (now Zhuravne in western Ukraine) Thon in his final years headed the tourist department for the Read More

“They became my children too”: The Multi-layered meanings of family letters from the Jewish Maquis in France

Introduction On 6th June 1944, Robert Gamzon, the leader of the Jewish Scouts of France, wrote a letter to his wife, Denise Gamzon about a local underground scout group he’d visited. The group was situated near the southern French city of Castres, just across the Agout river from another team he had worked closely with Read More

Private Parcel Campaigns from Axis-allied Finland to the Ghettos of Nazi Occupied Poland

During the death march in 1945, Nena Szlezynger, a Polish-Jewish seventeen-year-old girl, was marching with the inmates of a Silesian labour camp in Neusalz an der Oder towards Dresden. She was wearing a blue winter coat with a fur collar, a valued possession she had been able to keep for over two years after being 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

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

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