“I give you my treasure. I beg you – you are also a mother – to save my child. God will repay you for everything, and I will too (…). My child will bring you luck, you will see. I beg you, yourself a mother, to have mercy on my child (…).”

Thus begins a desperate plea of a Jewish mother, Eda Kunstler, to a Catholic mother, Zofia Sendler. Eda searched for a way to save her infant daughter Anita from the Kraków ghetto in German-occupied Poland. The letter written in 1943 testifies to the desperation that Eda faced and illuminates the shreds of agency that she strove to exercise as a mother. More broadly, Eda’s note demonstrates the impossible choices that parents were forced to make in an effort to try to assure their children’s survival during the Holocaust.

In November this year, the EHRI project will be 10 years old. For the first time in its existence, the Kick-Off meeting of a new phase was not an actual gathering of people but an online event. However, as Director of Archives at Yad Vashem and EHRI veteran, Haim Gertner, said: We are used to working from afar yet still close together, and this was visible during the Zoom event.

The Center for Urban History of East Central Europe will mainly be involved in EHRI’s training and education and share their knowledge and experience for localisation and capacity building. The Center will also welcome EHRI fellows.

The Center for Urban History is an independent institution that focuses its work on urban history research, digital history projects, and public history activities. Our aims are to enhance international cooperation in research, to explore the possibilities of digital technologies in the humanities, and to rethink the roles of history in modern societies. The Center’s work has several objectives: to research the history of Eastern and Central European cities; to promote urban history in an interdisciplinary format; to foster international academic and cultural exchange; to deepen knowledge and understanding of the complexity and diversity of history and heritage in Eastern and Central European cities; and to enhance cooperation among local and international institutions.

EHRI Meetings Held Online

Preceding the Kick-Off of the third phase of the EHRI project, the consortium of the EHRI Preparatory Phase (EHRI-PP) project held its second General Partner Meeting online. EHRI-PP has the specific task to transform EHRI from a project into a permanent organization. Although it was sad that we could not, as was originally planned, meet in person at EHRI partner Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Zoom event was successful.