“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
Category: Photography and Films
One Film – Two Visits. Edith Bruck in Tiszakarád
Edith Bruck Edith Bruck is often called “Signora Auschwitz” in the press: her book with the same title was published in 1999.1 Only recently, with the English translation of her autobiography, she has received international recognition on a level commensurate with other writers of the Shoah like Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, and Primo Levi – Read More
Lotte Porges – The Story Behind the Photograph
Between the years 1942–1945, three different staged films were created in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Ghetto. Only a few short shots or fragments of the original versions have been preserved.[1] The most famous of these became the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet,[2] which became known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Read More
The 1948 Genocide-Convention: Raphael Lemkin’s struggle for the ‘law of the world’
On 9 December 1948 the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN). Getting the topic onto international agenda and the ratification of the document, however, were both difficult tasks. The Convention’s history goes back to a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, Read More
Forced Labourers and the Water Works Camps in the Lublin District
Depicting non-industrial forced labour: The example of water works camps in the Lublin district The photograph depicts a rarely discussed topic in Holocaust historiography: The daily life of Jewish forced labourers in early water works camps (Wasserwirtschaftslager) in the Lublin District. The series of photographs from the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance at Read More
Murdered on the Verge of Survival: Massacres in the Last Days of the Siege of Budapest, 1945 Part II
Part II: The Profile of the Perpetrators Introduction Part I of the present blog post provided the readers with an overview of one of the last and bloodiest crimes committed by Hungarian extremist Arrow Cross militiamen in Budapest at the very end of the war. The documents presented included post-war testimonies of eyewitnesses and Read More
Murdered on the Verge of Survival: Massacres in the Last Days of the Siege of Budapest, 1945
Part I: First-Hand Accounts Introduction The diverse and multilingual nature of Holocaust-era records is clearly exemplified in the case of the historical sources pertaining to the Holocaust in Hungary. Despite large-scale wartime damage and intentional destruction, millions of Holocaust-era archival records survived in Hungary. Due to the subsequent border changes, the documents on the Holocaust Read More
Photographing refugee deportation: On visual representation of refugees
The photograph discussed in this blog post captures a dramatic moment during an attempted deportation of a group of Jews who escaped after the occupation of the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. The series of photographs captured on March 30, 1939 at the Croydon airport close to London has attained an almost iconic character; their visual Read More
