“[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
Category: Early Documentation
Visualising Methodology in The Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies’ Project
Introduction “We all have a duty to fulfil towards our past,” implored Dr Eva Reichmann, former Director of Research at The Wiener Library, in a short front-page appeal in the journal of Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain in 1954. Reichmann’s impassioned article launched the Library’s ambitious effort in the mid-1950s to record testimonies Read More
“In the Country of Numbers”: Gerardo Nassau’s unpublished memoir of Sachsenhausen
Preface On the night of 9-10 November 1938, SA and Hitler Youth units took to the streets of Germany and, in plain view, set synagogues on fire, smashed the window fronts of Jewish businesses, attacked Jewish people, and vandalized their homes. Well over 1,300 Jewish men and women were killed during the riots or died Read More
Alter Ogień Testimony – the earliest testimony in the ŻIH collection
On August 29th, 1944, a group of Holocaust survivors gathered in Lublin to set up the Commission for the History of the Jews. It took place a month after Lublin was liberated from German occupation. The Jews living there had already organized the Jewish Committee, addressing a multitude of everyday problems. The next task, to Read More
Yiddish play manuscript draws attention to early Holocaust commemoration in Finland
In 2005, when I was working at the National Archives of Finland, I was commissioned to do an inventory of archival material found in a cellar of a building owned by the Jewish Community of Helsinki. Amidst thousands of documents, I found the manuscript of a tableau called Muter Rokhl un ire kinder (Mother Rachel Read More
Registration Cards: the Holocaust Survivors in Poland
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
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
