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The EHRI document blog is a space to share ideas about Holocaust-related archival documents, and their presentation and interpretation using digital tools.
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Methodological Nationalism in History Writing. Missing Locals of Slovakia

March 10, 2022 - 12:23pm
“The testimony you requested from the Fortunoff Video Archive cannot be viewed in Slovakia until 2026,” was the response we received when attempting to access a taped interview with a Jewish Holocaust witness from Sečovce (in Hungarian: Gálszécs), a small town in eastern Slovakia. A social historian of the Holocaust and an ethnographer who has Read More

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

January 27, 2022 - 12:05pm
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

Polish-Jewish Industrialists and Their Links to Loved Ones: An Analysis of the Correspondence of Dr Joseph Thon

December 14, 2021 - 4:42pm
On the morning of the 8th January 1959, Dr Joseph Thon passed away in the French Hospital, New York aged fifty-five with no spouse or children after a short illness.1 Born Joseph Teitelbaum in December 1903 in Żurawno, Poland (now Zhuravne in western Ukraine) Thon in his final years headed the tourist department for the Read More

Diplomatic Reports on the Holocaust – an EHRI Online Edition

November 18, 2021 - 5:17pm
In April of 1939, the American diplomat Ray Atherton, stationed in Sofia, reported to the Secretary of State that “there is no sympathy in Bulgaria for the anti-Jewish demonstrations of this organization ‚Workers of New Bulgaria‘,” which “is of foreign origin and is, it is believed, directly encouraged from Germany”.1 This assumption was mirrored by Read More

Left Behind – A Project Opening up Little Known Holocaust Histories as Well as New Tools

September 29, 2021 - 5:10pm
Almost half of the Jewish population of Belgium was murdered during the Holocaust. Complete families were wiped out, creating blind spots in the information available to reconstruct their stories in particular, but also certain aspects of the Belgian case in general. Personal documents of survivors and non-survivors thus become even more important to fill these Read More

“They became my children too”: The Multi-layered meanings of family letters from the Jewish Maquis in France

July 29, 2021 - 10:42am
Introduction On 6th June 1944, Robert Gamzon, the leader of the Jewish Scouts of France, wrote a letter to his wife, Denise Gamzon about a local underground scout group he’d visited. The group was situated near the southern French city of Castres, just across the Agout river from another team he had worked closely with Read More

The Lost Jews of Stettin: A Revealing Letter from 1942

June 2, 2021 - 11:15am
For the past four years, I’ve been working with Harvard Law School’s extensive collection of documents from all 13 Nuremberg trials. My role is to create metadata for prosecution and defense exhibits (and source documents) so that future searchers will be able to find each item when the whole collection is online. The collection has Read More

Talking about Sexualised Violence: The Presentation of Rape and Male Power in an Oral-History Interview

April 26, 2021 - 3:32pm
The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute is the biggest archive of oral-history interviews of Jews and other survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Trained volunteers have conducted more than 50,000 interviews from 1994 until today. The interviews were filmed and did not only focus on the period of the Holocaust Read More

EHRI in TEITOK

March 17, 2021 - 3:30pm
The Institute for Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL) put together an experimental interface for the EHRI digital editions, a corpus framework called TEITOK, as an alternative to the current interface in Omeka. Where the current interface of EHRI based is centered around documents, TEITOK is centered around texts. In many aspects, the TEITOK interface for Read More

Attempting to Flee: The Correspondence of Dr Ernst Neustadt

January 26, 2021 - 11:16am
On 1st February 1946, Prof. J. B. Skemp, a Greek scholar and secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), an organisation designed to help academics at risk in occupied Europe, wrote a letter to Dr Ernst Neustadt addressed to 53 Belsize Park Gardens, London: ‘On going through our files, I Read More

Private Parcel Campaigns from Axis-allied Finland to the Ghettos of Nazi Occupied Poland

December 14, 2020 - 10:31am
During the death march in 1945, Nena Szlezynger, a Polish-Jewish seventeen-year-old girl, was marching with the inmates of a Silesian labour camp in Neusalz an der Oder towards Dresden. She was wearing a blue winter coat with a fur collar, a valued possession she had been able to keep for over two years after being Read More

Rescue and Parenting through Correspondence

November 2, 2020 - 10:56am
“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 (…).”1 Thus begins a Read More

Connecting the Records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission

September 28, 2020 - 12:43pm
“We were arrested at the Hungarian border and taken to the camp Stryi [a prisoner of war camp near Lviv in Ukraine], where we spent 12 days in prison. They brought a Jew to the camp, took everything he had, and gave him a rope to hang himself. The Germans didn’t pay attention to us Read More

More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching

August 31, 2020 - 11:12am
The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Uninitiated researchers approaching Fortunoff’s collection, in particular undergraduate students tasked with using Read More

“Mengele picked me and they took me to a hospital”: The Compensation Claims of Hungarian Victims of Pseudo-medical Experiments

July 22, 2020 - 3:57pm
“In July 1944, following the order of Mengele, I was taken to the revier of the Gipsy lager. On the third day I was put to sleep and taken to the surgery. Sometime later I woke with terrible belly- and backpain. Three weeks later the anesthesia was repeated. Then I was in hospital for 4–5 Read More

Mapping the Hachshara Training Centers in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

May 19, 2020 - 10:07am
The questionnaire of the Hehahalutz office for those interested in Hachshara training during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in this post gives insight into one of the problematic ways of emigration in the early years of the occupation. Hachshara activities changed considerably at that time, as well as the social character of its participants.  Read More

One Film – Two Visits. Edith Bruck in Tiszakarád

April 22, 2020 - 11:04am
Edith Bruck Edith Bruck is often called “Signora Auschwitz” in the press: her book with the same title was published in 1999.1 Only recently, with the English translation of her autobiography, she has received international recognition on a level commensurate with other writers of the Shoah like Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, and Primo Levy – Read More

“It is folly not to do anything, even if one cannot do everything”

February 6, 2020 - 11:34am
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

Spatial Queries and the First Deportations from Slovakia

December 12, 2019 - 1:20pm
As a part of my research on the history of refugee no man’s land at the end of the 1930s in East-Central Europe, I examined the deportations of Jews from Slovakia in November 1938, many of whom were subsequently trapped along the demarcation line between the Czecho-Slovak and Hungarian posts. The little known and extremely Read More

From the Ghetto Revolt to the Warsaw Uprising – Hungarian Jews in KL Warschau

November 14, 2019 - 4:33pm
“We were clearing up the ruins of the devastated Warsaw ghetto…While clearing the rubble, we found many dead bodies. Despite the [Germans’] ban, we gave them a burial. Some had knives and weapons in their hands” – remembered 19-year-old Hungarian Jewish survivor, József Davidovics in 1945. Roughly a year after the Warsaw ghetto revolt was Read More

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