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
Tag: Postwar Period
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
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
History on the Margins: The Surviving Remnant and Yiddish Holocaust Literature in the Stockholm Jewish Library
Rachel Auerbach’s (1903—1976) Oyf di felder fun Treblinke – a reportazsh (In the Fields of Treblinka – a Report) from 1946 was the first book I happened to come across when I started inventorying a collection of Yiddish books in Judiska Biblioteket, the Jewish Library in Stockholm. A shiver ran down my spine when I 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
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
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
Registration Cards: the Holocaust Survivors in Poland
The Origins of the Central File The document presented in this post is one of the nearly 300.000 registration cards used by The Central Committee for the Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP) during the registration of the Holocaust survivors. The process of registration was carried out by the Records and Statistics Department 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
Jakub Leipzig Interview: Jewish Displacement in Italy through ITS Documents
Introduction The following report is one of approximately 30 million documents held in the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) – an extensive and unique collection that provides information about the fates of millions of refugees uprooted during World War II. In addition to the economic, political and social damages, World War II drastically Read More
