Introduction “We all have a duty to fulfil towards our past,” implored Dr Eva Reichmann, former Director of Research at The Wiener Library, in a short front-page appeal in the journal of Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain in 1954. Reichmann’s impassioned article launched the Library’s ambitious effort in the mid-1950s to record testimonies Read More
Category: Testimony
Death Blows Overhead: The Last Transports from Hungary, November 1944
Introduction In the morning of November 6, 1944, a column of civilians set off on the highway stretching westwards from Budapest to Vienna. All of them were Jews, mostly middle-aged and elderly women and men, forcibly mobilised by the Hungarian far-right Arrow Cross government to build fortifications on the eastern frontier of the collapsing Nazi Read More
“In the Country of Numbers”: Gerardo Nassau’s unpublished memoir of Sachsenhausen
Preface On the night of 9-10 November 1938, SA and Hitler Youth units took to the streets of Germany and, in plain view, set synagogues on fire, smashed the window fronts of Jewish businesses, attacked Jewish people, and vandalized their homes. Well over 1,300 Jewish men and women were killed during the riots or died Read More
Murdered on the Verge of Survival: Massacres in the Last Days of the Siege of Budapest, 1945 Part II
Part II: The Profile of the Perpetrators Introduction Part I of the present blog post provided the readers with an overview of one of the last and bloodiest crimes committed by Hungarian extremist Arrow Cross militiamen in Budapest at the very end of the war. The documents presented included post-war testimonies of eyewitnesses and Read More
Alter Ogień Testimony – the earliest testimony in the ŻIH collection
On August 29th, 1944, a group of Holocaust survivors gathered in Lublin to set up the Commission for the History of the Jews. It took place a month after Lublin was liberated from German occupation. The Jews living there had already organized the Jewish Committee, addressing a multitude of everyday problems. The next task, to 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
Letters from Children on the First Kindertransport
The following document is just one of a unique collection of 365 eyewitness testimonies gathered in the days, weeks, and months following the November Pogrom of 1938, alternatively known as ‘Kristallnacht’ or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. At the time, Alfred Wiener, the German-Jewish founder of The Wiener Library, was heading the Central Jewish Information Read More
Testimony of Valerie Straussová
Testimony of Valerie Straussová and the Dokumentační akce (Documentation project) Within weeks of liberation, Valerie Straussová, the concentration and labour camp survivor, gave her first testimony about her imprisonment and persecution, as part of one of the documentation initiatives – Dokumentační akce (Dokumentation project). Immediately after the end of the war, similar projects were established Read More
