The newspaper article, entitled “Looting of Jewish cemeteries in Odessa,” was probably published in spring 1945. According to it, “the transportation to Bucharest, in several wagons, of tombstones taken from the graves of Jewish cemeteries in Odessa” took place. The Odessa city hall sold the tombstones to various individuals and the mayor Gherman Pântea approved Read More
Category: Early Documentation
Chance Encounters in the Holocaust Archive: Finding Elżbieta Nadel’s “From the Black Album 1939-1945”
In late 2020, I stumbled across a curious listing in the USHMM’s online database: an entry labeled “Z czarnej teki 1939-1945 (The Black Album1, 1939-1945) / Elżbieta Nadel.”2 It was described simply as a set of 19 small photographic reproductions mounted on black cards measuring only 14 cm that was made in 1946 in Prague. Read More
History on the Margins: The Surviving Remnant and Yiddish Holocaust Literature in the Stockholm Jewish Library
Rachel Auerbach’s (1903—1976) Oyf di felder fun Treblinke – a reportazsh (In the Fields of Treblinka – a Report) from 1946 was the first book I happened to come across when I started inventorying a collection of Yiddish books in Judiska Biblioteket, the Jewish Library in Stockholm. A shiver ran down my spine when I Read More
Documenting the Documenter: Piecing together the history of Polish Holocaust survivor-historian Luba Melchior
“Testimony received by Institute Assistant Luba Melchior.” This sentence appears on 61 of the 512 complete witness testimonies collected from Polish survivors of Nazi persecution by the Polish Research Institute (PIZ) in Lund, Sweden, in 1945 and 1946.1 Yet, Polish Holocaust survivor Luba Melchior did not leave her own testimony with the PIZ survivor historical Read More
Connecting the Records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission
“We were arrested at the Hungarian border and taken to the camp Stryi [a prisoner of war camp near Lviv in Ukraine], where we spent 12 days in prison. They brought a Jew to the camp, took everything he had, and gave him a rope to hang himself. The Germans didn’t pay attention to us Read More
“Mengele picked me and they took me to a hospital”: The Compensation Claims of Hungarian Victims of Pseudo-medical Experiments
“In July 1944, following the order of Mengele, I was taken to the revier of the Gipsy lager. On the third day I was put to sleep and taken to the surgery. Sometime later I woke with terrible belly- and backpain. Three weeks later the anesthesia was repeated. Then I was in hospital for 4–5 Read More
From the Ghetto Revolt to the Warsaw Uprising – Hungarian Jews in KL Warschau
“We were clearing up the ruins of the devastated Warsaw ghetto…While clearing the rubble, we found many dead bodies. Despite the [Germans’] ban, we gave them a burial. Some had knives and weapons in their hands” – remembered 19-year-old Hungarian Jewish survivor, József Davidovics in 1945. Roughly a year after the Warsaw ghetto revolt was Read More
Files of the Austrian “Concentration Camp Association”
“We confirm the receipt of your registration to our state association and welcome you as a fellow sufferer. We would only like to ask you for further information of your reason for arrest; ‘political’ – as you state is too general.” The quoted lines come from a correspondence that is attached to the application for Read More
“Historical Meaning Beyond the Personal”: Survivor Agency and Mediation in the Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies Collection
“I am still so completely under the impression of your terrible suffering that every word that I could thank you with for this [report] seems inadequate….You have thus demonstrated that you have faced up to a moral task, which, as I hope, carries a reward in itself: You have helped to ensure that your experiences 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
