EHRI Partner the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) organises an online workshop "The Fantastic Afterlives of the Holocaust" from 16-18 June 2021. You can follow the workshop online via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pcOCtpz4uEtC5uD2UIgvp1nFAsvERSUSw.

Ghosts, apparitions, phantoms, demons, monsters, and miracles all inhabit postwar references to the Holocaust. They constitute recurrent, though often neglected, tropes in testimonies and memoirs of survivors, but also increasingly come to the fore in contemporary engagements with the Holocaust. Fantastic, spectral, supernatural, monstrous, and uncanny figures permeate personal accounts of the Holocaust that stretch across generational boundaries, inform artistic and literary practices, and, as a recent development, also academic writing. Whether as incarnations of “ultimate evil”, concoctions of post-Holocaust imaginations, or figurations of its continuous relevance and resonance, their presence establishes a set of new themes through which to address the Holocaust and its experiential, affective, cultural, and political impact.

New Exhibition: Death Marches: Evidence and Memory | At The Wiener Holocaust Library, London, UK | Opening 18 May 2021

Towards the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of prisoners still held within the Nazi camp system were forcibly evacuated in terrible conditions under heavy guard. Many of these chaotic, and brutal, evacuations became known as ‘death marches’ by those who endured them. They form the last ruthless chapter of the Nazi genocide, one that is little-known or understood.

The Presentation of Rape and Male Power in an Oral-History Interview

This new EHRI Blog post, written by former EHRI fellow Florian Zabransky, analyses two seemingly unrelated incidents in an oral-history interview, dealing with topics of intimacy and sexualised violence. The interview with Michael Begum, the case study of this blog entry, was conducted on 19 October 1996 in Los Angeles in English. He was born on the 22^nd of June 1922 in a small shtetl called Parafjanava around 150km north of Minsk (then the Soviet Union, today Belarus). The interview is part of the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the biggest archive of oral-history interviews of Jews and other survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides.

EHRI Supports the #ProtectTheFacts Campaign

Over 75 years after the end of the Second World War, Holocaust memory is under threat. Holocaust distortion is on the rise and is eroding our understanding of historical truth. Holocaust distortion benefits from a general lack of awareness. It doesn’t stop at national borders, nor is it found only in one language. International cooperation is essential to countering it.

ProtectTheFacts is an international initiative of the European Commission, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the United Nations, and UNESCO, who have joined forces to raise awareness of Holocaust distortion – both how to recognise it and how to counter it.