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

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

“Everyone Had to Do With It, Either Through Family or Some Other Means”: Testimonies of Ukrainian Witnesses About the Holocaust in Volhynia

The Holocaust in Ukraine: contemporary historiographical trends and the need for new sources Ever since the publication of Jan T. Gross’ monograph Neighbors,1 research on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe has increasingly shifted towards the use of eyewitness accounts. This became a logical consequence of the bigger shift of the “era of the witness” since 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

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

Methodological Nationalism in History Writing. Missing Locals of Slovakia

“The testimony you requested from the Fortunoff Video Archive cannot be viewed in Slovakia until 2026,” was the response we received when attempting to access a taped interview with a Jewish Holocaust witness from Sečovce (in Hungarian: Gálszécs), a small town in eastern Slovakia. A social historian of the Holocaust and an ethnographer who has Read More

Talking about Sexualised Violence: The Presentation of Rape and Male Power in an Oral-History Interview

The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is the biggest archive of oral-history interviews of Jews and other survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Trained volunteers have conducted more than 50,000 interviews from 1994 until today. The interviews were filmed and did not only focus on the period of the Holocaust Read More

More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching

The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Uninitiated researchers approaching Fortunoff’s collection, in particular undergraduate students tasked with using 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