“After Ilonka and I were shown to an apartment in a building, we stayed inside with one group of children, huddling because of the cold. […] I was aware of the scary situation we were in, but unlike Ilonka, I did not feel scared. In fact, I did not feel much of anything at all, Read More
Tag: Ghetto
Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust in Ukraine. A Brief Overview
When German troops occupied the city of Zvenigorodka (Cherkasy Oblast) on July 29, 1941, approximately 1,300 local Jews and refugees from the west lived there, which was just over ten percent of the total population. There were no spontaneous pogroms here; instead, Nazi occupiers forced all Jews to register and sent them to forced labor 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
From Urban Legend to Documented Fact: The History and Memory of the Jewish Ghetto and the Holocaust in Kherson
Kherson is a large city in southern Ukraine and the regional center of the Kherson region. After the Germans occupied the city in August 1941, they established a Jewish ghetto in the city. Yet, eighty years later this very real story has become an urban legend of sorts. Even a few years ago, when I Read More
Identifying the author of an anonymous diary from the Holocaust in Hungary
While on my EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship at Yad Vashem in August 2022, I discovered the author of an anonymous diary from a Hungarian Jew in wartime Budapest. The search for the identity of the author drew on clues in the text of the diary, photographs folded between its pages, census records, and school records. Read More
“It is Folly not to do Anything, Even if one can not do Everything”
Introduction On August 19, 1944, a quite extraordinary thing happened in Hungary, which had been under German occupation for five months already. Dr János Benedek, the főszolgabíró 1 of the Kiskőrös district ordered the internment of István Velich, the agricultural officer of the district and local functionary of the Eastern Frontline Companions’ Association (Keleti Arcvonal Read More
First Call for Resistance to the Nazis in the Vilna Ghetto: “Let us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter”
On the cold night of 31 December 1941 a group of about 150 young Jews crowded in the small kitchen of Vilna Ghetto, in Straszuna Str. No.2. They pretended to be celebrating the New Year’s Eve, to distract the attention of their German and Lithuanian guards, who were in the process of getting drunk. The Read More
Messages from the Ghetto – Viennese transports to the General Government in early 1941
“It is impossible in just a few sentences to come close to being able to describe the individual tragic episodes of this transport. We ask that these people, who – so unprepared and without fault – have been forced out of civilisation, are not forgotten. Otherwise we will perish in misery. The food that we Read More
Correspondence Across Ghetto Walls
Officially censored postcards addressed from or to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, are items that are well-represented in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Correspondence, which was the only option inmates had of communicating with the outside world, was highly controlled and supervised by the SS command. At different times in the ghetto’s history, Read More
Using Wikidata to build an authority list of Holocaust-era ghettos
Introduction In the spring of 2017, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI, work package 11) began a pilot project to link the EHRI ghettos vocabulary set with Wikidata. One of the primary objectives of work package 11 is to build an authoritative vocabulary of ghettos that can be used to describe the diverse Holocaust-related archival Read More
