“After Ilonka and I were shown to an apartment in a building, we stayed inside with one group of children, huddling because of the cold. […] I was aware of the scary situation we were in, but unlike Ilonka, I did not feel scared. In fact, I did not feel much of anything at all, Read More
Category: Documents of Jewish Organisations
“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
Mapping the Hachshara Training Centers in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
The questionnaire of the Hehahalutz office for those interested in Hachshara training during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in this post gives insight into one of the problematic ways of emigration in the early years of the occupation. Hachshara activities changed considerably at that time, as well as the social character of its participants. Read More
First Call for Resistance to the Nazis in the Vilna Ghetto: “Let us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter”
On the cold night of 31 December 1941 a group of about 150 young Jews crowded in the small kitchen of Vilna Ghetto, in Straszuna Str. No.2. They pretended to be celebrating the New Year’s Eve, to distract the attention of their German and Lithuanian guards, who were in the process of getting drunk. The 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
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
Death Certificate of Gabriel Frankl from the Terezín Ghetto
Todesfallanzeigen (Death Certificates) The document presented in this post is one of more than 20,000 death certificates (Todesfallanzeigen) from Terezín (Theresienstadt) that have been preserved from December 1941 until September 1943 and were issued for all of the 30,000 people who perished in the ghetto. These death certificates, informed by normal procedures medical inspection, were Read More
Reports from the No Man’s Land
The documents presented here have a common topic: refugees stranded during 1938 in the No Man’s Land on the borders of Czechoslovakia and its neighbours – a subject of my current research project focused on the interplay between large scale expulsions of Jews and citizenship in the second half of the 1930s. 1938 was, in Read More
