The journalist Richard Bermann was one of the many Austrians threatened by the Nazi regime who tried in vain to flee on the night train to Czechoslovakia the night of the 11th March 1938. After approximately 180 Austrian refugees were turned back at the border, Bermann appealed via telegram to the Czechoslovakian president for the refugees Read More
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Recognising the ‘Anonymous’ Resistors: Everyday Heroes in Occupied Hungary
On 9th July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest and began work on a rescue project that would protect thousands of Hungarian Jews. His efforts have been the subject of many books, monuments and films, rightly recognizing his heroism. Yet, while his operation has become the main example of rescue in Hungary, many other individuals Read More
Transports from Mechelen
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportations to the East from the central assembly camp in Belgium for Jews, Roma and Sinti Kazerne Dossin started a series of online publications to mark these events. Around the date of departure of the convoy two personal stories per transport were written to lift the historical facts Read More
“Re-Germanization” and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle Camps: The Geography of Expulsion
“Extermination and assimilation were two sides of the same coin.”1 The author of this alarming phrase is one of the very few scholars who have written in English2 about the ‘re-Germanization” program run in part by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, an SS agency set up to take care of the needs of Read More
Using Named Entity Recognition to Enhance Access to a Museum Catalog
Introduction Digital technologies are successfully applied in cultural heritage projects supporting digitization of cultural objects, metadata creation, metadata maintenance, creation of digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research and many others. When we discuss archival digital textual content, some of the most imminent tasks are related to automatic metadata generation, searchability and preservation and these can Read More
A wartime diary of two Dutch Jews in hiding
“[T]he moment on 10 September 1942 we stepped out of the train in Aalten, I thought: ‘Is the war still going on? Does the persecution of the Jews still exist? Here, everything is so quiet and so different from what we have become used to recently. Here, we may be able to become even more 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
The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen
Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had been inaugurated in 1995 at the former SS-Sammellager Mecheln, better known as the Dossin barracks, Read More
Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to a given person. There could be several reasons for that – the documents are spread 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
