“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
Tag: Postwar Period
The 1948 Genocide-Convention: Raphael Lemkin’s struggle for the ‘law of the world’
On 9 December 1948 the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN). Getting the topic onto international agenda and the ratification of the document, however, were both difficult tasks. The Convention’s history goes back to a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, Read More
Registration Cards: the Holocaust Survivors in Poland
The Origins of the Central File The document presented in this post is one of the nearly 300.000 registration cards used by The Central Committee for the Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP) during the registration of the Holocaust survivors. The process of registration was carried out by the Records and Statistics Department 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
