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Project Left Behind

EHRI Webinar | Left Behind: The Impact of Forced Labour by Organisation Todt on Survival Chances of Antwerp Jews

09/06/2022

INVITATION | Wednesday 22 June 2022, 3:00 PM CET

You are invited to join the second EHRI webinar, which will be presented by Dorien Styven, researcher and archivist from EHRI partner Kazerne Dossin in Belgium, with the support of Wolfgang Schellenbacher, who is involved in the mapping and visualisation aspect, from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI) and the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW).

Dorien Styven and Wolfgang Schellenbacher will present the project Left Behind: The impact of forced labour by Organisation Todt on survival chances of Antwerp Jews.

Between June and September 1942 over 2.250 Jewish men were deported from Belgium to Northern France where they were forced to work for Organisation Todt, the German enterprise responsible for building the Atlantic wall. Living conditions at the labour camps were poor and, in October 1942, most of the men were deported directly from Northern France to Auschwitz-Birkenau where the majority of them was murdered.

When taken to France, the men left their families behind in Belgium. Kazerne Dossin has created a dataset containing information on the 1.625 Antwerp OT labourers and a sample of 1.500 of their relatives. The aim of the project was to determine the impact of OT forced labour on the survival chances of the families left behind in Antwerp. Macro-analysis led to conclusions regarding the augmented deportation risk of the relatives of OT labourers in comparison to Jewish families in Antwerp in general. Micro-analysis of archival items such as journals, photos and letters led to explanations for this higher deportation rate.

Big Data 2022

Call for Papers | IEEE Big Data 2022: 7th Computational Archival Science Workshop

10/05/2022

17-20 December 2022 | Osaka, Japan

Oct 1, 2022: Due date for full workshop papers submission

The large-scale digitization of analogue archives, the emerging diverse forms of born-digital archive, and the new ways in which researchers across disciplines (as well as the public)wish to engage with archival material, are resulting in disruptions to transitional archival theories and practices.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

Ukraine | EHRI Online Course: The Holocaust in Ukraine

26/04/2022

By Karel Berkhoff, co-Project Director EHRI and NIOD

As a research infrastructure devoted to the study of genocide and war, EHRI is shocked that an unprovoked and inexcusable attack on a sovereign country is possible in Europe in the 21st century and has issued a statement condemning Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. It is often argued that to make sense of the present, one must understand the past. This is certainly true for the war that is now raging in Ukraine. For this reason, we would like to bring to your attention the chapter The Holocaust in Ukraine of the EHRI Online Course in Holocaust Studies, launched in 2015. Filled with source material in original languages and in English translations, and background information about sources and the historiography, it gives insights into a dark episode that still resonates today, and that is distorted by those who do not wish Ukraine well. Although EHRI’s primary impact is scientific, it also hopes that Holocaust research and a better understanding of the past, will help to build foundations for open and non-discriminatory societies across Europe and beyond.

Warsaw Ghetto database

EHRI Partner Polish Center for Holocaust Research | A Gateway to the Past – Database getto.pl

26/04/2022

By dr Agnieszka Haska, Polish Center for Holocaust Research

“I am writing hastily, thinking that these pages will one day be found in a liberated Warsaw.”

This is a final sentence from a testimony written in June 1943 in the attic of one of the houses in Warsaw, where the author was hiding with her son after leaving the ghetto. She was writing at night, trying to recollect everything that happened to Warsaw Jews during German occupation and “render the picture precisely'' in a very impersonal manner. She also anonymized her testimony quite thoroughly – partially because of safety reasons, but one can also assume that it was her intention to make the narrative more universal, more objective. There is very little information the author is revealing about herself in the text – no names and surnames, no exact addresses in the ghetto -, only street names and the profession of her husband (doctor).

IHRA Guidelines | The Link Between Holocaust Historians and Access to Archives

26/04/2022

By Richelle Budd Caplan, Yad Vashem

The Holocaust (Shoah) was an unprecedented genocide, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people. The primary motivation was the Nazis’ antisemitic racist ideology. Between 1933 and 1941, Nazi Germany pursued a policy that dispossessed the Jews of their rights and their property, followed by the branding and concentration of the Jewish population. This policy gained broad support in Germany and much of occupied Europe. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis and their collaborators launched the systematic mass murder of the Jews. By 1945 nearly six million Jews had been murdered.

Recently the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance published Guidelines for Identifying Relevant Documentation for Holocaust Research, Education and Remembrance. An online event, hosted on Wednesday, 23 March, introduced these new guidelines for the first time to the general public. A number of EHRI-affiliated experts presented and participated in these proceedings.

EHRI Webinar with Štěpán Jurajda

Training | Successful Launch of a New EHRI Webinar Series

26/04/2022

Social Networks and Surviving the Holocaust

By Michala Lônčíková, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences

On March 23, a pilot EHRI Webinar was launched by our Work Package 10 (Thematic Layers across collections), the team which is also behind the EHRI Document Blog. This very first webinar, Social Networks and Surviving the Holocaust, was presented by Štěpán Jurajda, Mellon Endowment Professor with Tenure at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute (CERGE-EI) in Prague, Czech Republic. During the webinar, he acquainted the audience with the key findings of the statistical research on the social contacts of the Holocaust survivors, that he conducted together with Matěj Bělín (CERGE-EI) and Tomáš Jelínek (Moravian Business College Olomouc).

International Conference Warsaw

EHRI Partners | International Conference: Operation Reinhardt and the Destruction of Polish Jews

26/04/2022

27-29 November 2022, | POLIN Museum, Warsaw, Poland | Admission free

The conference, organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Operation Reinhardt, seeks to present the newest research on the Holocaust in Poland. Although the Nazi operation to exterminate Jews in German-occuppied central Poland between 1942–1943 remains the primary focus, the organisers are interested in the wider process of the destruction of Jews from 1941 until 1945 within the territory of the pre-war Second Polish Republic.

USHMM Conference Wehrmacht

EHRI Partner US Holocaust Memorial Museum | International Conference: Wehrmacht Detention Sites and the Holocaust

26/04/2022

VIRTUAL Event | 19 May 2022 | Admission free | Registration required

For the first time in English, a new publication by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents the mass murder of Soviet POWs by Nazi Germany's armed forces, the Wehrmacht. The latest volume of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, which also describes the extent of the Wehrmacht camp system, contains testimony not previously published.

Bundesarchiv

Conny Kristel Fellow Judith Vöcker | "A Red Thread Throughout My PhD"

25/04/2022

Judith was an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow at the Federal Archives in Berlin (March 2022), the Wiener Holocaust Library in London (January 2019) and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (September 2018).

By Judith Vöcker

The EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship has been a red thread throughout my PhD in History at the University of Leicester as I was awarded my first EHRI Fellowship at the beginning of my PhD in September 2018 and January 2019, and now, during my writing up year, a second Conny Kristel Fellowship.

EHRI Document Blog Excel Sheet

EHRI Document Blog | “What can I do with this messy spreadsheet?" Converting from Excel sheets to fully compliant EAD-XML files

25/04/2022

The latest EHR Blogpost, written by Herminio Garcia González, looks at the difficulties many Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) face sharing their collections' meta-data in standardised and sustainable ways due to an absence of in-house IT support or capabilities. Many institutions rely on more familiar programs like text processors, spreadsheets, or low-code databases.

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