“We were clearing up the ruins of the devastated Warsaw ghetto…While clearing the rubble, we found many dead bodies. Despite the [Germans’] ban, we gave them a burial. Some had knives and weapons in their hands” – remembered 19-year-old Hungarian Jewish survivor, József Davidovics in 1945. Roughly a year after the Warsaw ghetto revolt was Read More
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Integrating new data from Yad Vashem’s archives into the EHRI portal – methods and practice
Introduction The export activity of Yad Vashem had two goals. Firstly, we wanted to update the Yad Vashem content on the EHRI portal, improving the quality of the descriptions and adding a few new records. Secondly, we wanted to prepare the infrastructure to have a sustainable connection to the EHRI portal, allowing content updates and 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
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
“Historical Meaning Beyond the Personal”: Survivor Agency and Mediation in the Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies Collection
“I am still so completely under the impression of your terrible suffering that every word that I could thank you with for this [report] seems inadequate….You have thus demonstrated that you have faced up to a moral task, which, as I hope, carries a reward in itself: You have helped to ensure that your experiences 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
Pecunia Olet: Aryanizing Jewish Shops in Gödöllő, Hungary
Intro In March 1942, the town council of Gödöllő decided to cancel the rent of those Jewish shopkeepers whose shops were located on the ground floor of the city hall. During the preparations, the council ordered a drawing of the ground plan of the city hall, which served as a market area at that time. Read More
Georeferencing Service for Archives
Archives often have the wish to make their collections searchable and findable on a map like Google Maps or Open Street Map. This is a nice interface for users on which they can zoom in on a specific geographic location and see what collections are linked to it. This promise of a user friendly geographic 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
Witnessing the Eve of Destruction. Ernő Munkácsi’s “How It Happened”
Introduction This blog post is devoted to the key publication and original sources of one of the major eyewitness chroniclers of the Holocaust in Hungary. In his book of 1947, Ernő Munkácsi, a leading official of the Jewish Congregation of Pest and the original chief secretary of the Hungarian Central Jewish Council, developed his interpretation of Read More
