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
Category: Names Documentation
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
When Were Social Status and Social Ties Supporting Holocaust Survival Chances?
How Can Statistical Methods of Social Sciences Complement Historical Research? Seeing faces of individual victims of the Holocaust, such as those of the prisoners of the Theresienstadt ghetto displayed by the publicly accessible database developed by the Theresienstadt Initiative Institute, is a critical element of remembering and understanding the Holocaust. Such databases often provide a Read More
Left Behind – A Project Opening up Little-Known Holocaust Histories as well as New Tools
Almost half of the Jewish population of Belgium was murdered during the Holocaust. Complete families were wiped out, creating blind spots in the information available to reconstruct their stories in particular, but also certain aspects of the Belgian case in general. Personal documents of survivors and non-survivors thus become even more important to fill these Read More
Spatial Queries and the First Deportations from Slovakia
As a part of my research on the history of refugee no man’s land at the end of the 1930s in East-Central Europe, I examined the deportations of Jews from Slovakia in November 1938, many of whom were subsequently trapped along the demarcation line between the Czecho-Slovak and Hungarian posts. The little known and extremely 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
Repatriation Efforts – Luxembourg State Policy Towards Jews during World War II
“When we returned to Luxembourg, our native country, we got off the train and went to the school building. We had no identification and a person wrote down in our papers Jew and Polish because my parents came from Poland. They had come years ago but they had never taken Luxembourgish citizenship. […] They did Read More
Transports from Mechelen
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportations to the East from the central assembly camp in Belgium for Jews, Roma and Sinti Kazerne Dossin started a series of online publications to mark these events. Around the date of departure of the convoy two personal stories per transport were written to lift the historical facts Read More
Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to a given person. There could be several reasons for that – the documents are spread Read More
The Haupt Family Documents
As an archival researcher at Yad Vashem, I often try to fill in the missing information from various sources. In the framework of the EHRI fellowship, I spent two weeks in the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in Warsaw, researching Holocaust-related materials. I wanted to find out what documents from the ŻIH archives Read More
