“We spend our lives living in darkness, in cold, and often in hunger.” – Jewish Entreaties to Slovak President Jozef Tiso During the Holocaust

Thousands of Jews throughout Europe, facing a shrinking universe of options and increasingly desperate circumstances, wrote to the representatives of the very governments that were persecuting them to ask for clemency from anti-Semitic measures during the Holocaust. They employed a variety of rhetorical strategies in their appeals, hoping that their words would be sufficiently convincing 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

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

Daily Orders from the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto

Daily Orders from the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto During the Second World War the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto was one of the major sites of suffering and death for the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and several European countries including Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Luxemburg and others. Of approximately 150,000 prisoners, over 30,000 died there between 1941 and Read More