Clara Vromen was born on September 27, 1931, in the Dutch city of Enschede to Jewish parents Abraham Vromen (b. unknown) and Minnie van Dam (b. 1907). Her father was a businessman and a member of the Zionist youth movement, who organized the hachsharot, the Palestine pioneering training programs, for German Jewish refugees in the Read More
Category: EHRI Conny Kristel Fellows
Uncovering Local Jewish Histories: Hungarian Jewish Community History Books
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many Jews in Hungary returned to discover the destruction of their small communities. All Jews outside the capital city, Budapest, had been deported between April and July 1944. This came to approximately 440,000 people, many of whom were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the few survivors Read More
Digital Holocaust Media at the Jewish Museum in Prague
In an increasingly digital world, museums and archives have long incorporated the use of digital media technologies, applications, and resources to support research, exhibitions, and education initiatives. As a recipient of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s Conny Kristel Fellowship, I spent four weeks at the Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP), a multi-building site spread across Read More
Exploring Lived Experience: Pinus Rubinstein’s Diary of the War and the Holocaust in Cernăuți
On February 16, 1947, Pinus Rubinstein a Holocaust survivor from Cernăuți (Ukr. Chernivtsi), then living in Romania, was preparing to leave for Palestine. He wrote in his diary: Today is probably the hardest day of my life. Put my files and documents in order. With a bleeding heart, I must sacrifice and destroy dear, expensive Read More
The Rescue of Jews in Albania during the Holocaust: A Story that is Still Unfolding…
“There is no religious or race prejudice in that country on the Adriatic”1 Herman Bernstein (US Ambassador to Albania, 1930-1933). Background As a recipient of the EHRI-Conny Kristel fellowship, I spent a short research period at the Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) in Milan, Italy. CDEC is an independent research institute for the Read More
The “Tombstones Affair”: On the Fate of Jewish Cemeteries in Odessa under the Romanian Occupation (1941-1944)
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
Wartime Paperwork: How Citizens Navigated Soviet Bureaucracy During and After World War II
Scraps of Paper Among the innumerous sources to be found in the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) are a great many personal collections of Jews from the Soviet Union. Most of them spent World War II in the Soviet rear or in the ranks of the Red Army, a minority survived the Holocaust under German or Read More
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
The NS-Policy of “Endlösung der Judenfrage” and the Soviet Medical Staff among the Jewish Prisoners of War in Central Ukraine
Introduction In August 2016, I took part in the 10-day seminar “Documents on the Holocaust”, held by the Federal Archive in Berlin and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). This seminar as well as my participation in the Holocaust Summer Program in Kyiv between 1 and 12 July 2019, and the EHRI fellowships I held Read More
Tracing the Dislocation of a Sinti Family in a Genocidal Context: the R165 Collection of the German Federal Archives
In September 1981, in the basement of the Tübingen University, German survivors of the Sinti and Roma genocide and remembrance activists captured the racial archives created by the scientific authorities under the Nazi regime to identify, deport and destroy their families.1 The documents seized were immediately given to the German Federal Archives. Today, this vast Read More
