“It is Folly not to do Anything, Even if one can not do Everything”

Introduction On August 19, 1944, a quite extraordinary thing happened in Hungary, which had been under German occupation for five months already. Dr János Benedek, the főszolgabíró 1  of the Kiskőrös district ordered the internment of István Velich, the agricultural officer of the district and local functionary of the Eastern Frontline Companions’ Association (Keleti Arcvonal 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

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

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

Elderly People in the Terezín Ghetto

Distribution of infirm people in the Terezín Ghetto This document from the Jewish Museum in Prague from September 5th 1942 details statistics about the “Distribution of infirm people in the ghetto”. Statistics on the elderly and so-called “infirm” people are quite common in the departments of the Jewish Self Administration. This document includes also a map of 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

Death Certificate of Gabriel Frankl from the Terezín Ghetto

Todesfallanzeigen (Death Certificates) The document presented in this post is one of more than 20,000 death certificates (Todesfallanzeigen) from Terezín (Theresienstadt) that have been preserved from December 1941 until September 1943 and were issued for all of the 30,000 people who perished in the ghetto. These death certificates, informed by normal procedures medical inspection, were Read More