The final episode of the third series of the EHRI podcast takes a step back to look at micro-archives in a more general sense. In keeping with our theme, however, we also focus on an object that teaches us more about the Holocaust. An object that represents both the richness of sources that can be found in micro-archives and the challenges that those working with them face. Our object of focus is a black and white photograph, depicting a group of prisoners dressed in the distinctive str...

In this podcast episode, we learn about a remarkable manuscript that survived the Holocaust and was later discovered to be the work of one of the most interesting modern creators of Hebrew literature in the 20th century: David Vogel. The manuscript is made up of pages upon pages of miniscule, uniform handwriting and was hidden by Vogel in the back garden of the boarding house in Hauteville, France where he was staying before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Vogel was murdered in Auschwitz c...

In this episode, a lost letter tells the extraordinary story of Tommy Benford Junior, a baby boy born in Paris in 1939 and saved by the incredible bravery of a Dutch woman called Truus Wijsmuller.  To look at, the letter is simple, and formally written, but it contains a father's desperate plea to save his son.  Tommy Benford Junior was born in Paris in 1939. His father was an accomplished American jazz drummer, and his mother, Sophia Mezzaro, was a dancer, singer and pianist from Vien...

In this episode, the object of our focus is a black and white photograph that offers a harrowing glimpse into the narrow survival of Nazi camp prisoners. Two of the survivors in this image would later travel to the ‘paradise’ of Windermere, in the Lake District in England, on 14 August 1945. The image contains a stark contrast; the jubilant gestures of greeting from the gaggle of young survivors sits in juxtaposition with the cargo train they are loaded onto, a vehicle normally used for trans...

In this episode, we focus on a stamp, printed on the inside jacket of a book donated to the National Library of Serbia in 1941. The stamp is remarkable not least because it belonged to a prominent Belgrade lawyer named Samuilo Demajo, whose family was murdered in May 1942 in a Dušegupka, a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas van. Though Demajo's life was abruptly ended, his legacy lives on in this and the approximately 200 other books that he donated in an effort to rebuild the public lib...

​The object of our attention in this episode is a well-travelled letter of 21 pages, received in 1997 by Professor Albert Lichtblau, in response for an appeal for "unpublished biographical memoirs" of Holocaust survivors he had posted on behalf of the Institute for Jewish History of Austria as well as the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The letter was written by Norbert Abeles, an Austrian living in Malawi, and its arrival prompted an exchange of further letters between Malawi and Austria, u...

In this podcast episode, released during Hanukka 2023, we talk with Ofer Lifshitz about a tiny memory booklet, as small as a young girl’s fist, that belonged to a teenage girl named Gita Rubanenko. Gita was born in 1929 and lived with her parents and sister in a town called Kovno in Lithuania. Kovno, also known as Kaunas, was before the war the capital and largest city of Lithuania. In 1939, Kovno had a vibrant Jewish community with approximately 32,000 people, about one-fourth of the c...

In this podcast episode, the object of our attention is a delicate paper heart, a small work of art, crafted by Elisabeth Salomon. You can enfold the 'heart', like a flower, and on each petal, you will find the name of the woman or girl (sometimes a boy or man) who made it, maybe a date or place, and endearing messages of gratitude. Elizábeth was not the only woman who crafted this paper heart. There are many paper "hearts", all with their own uniqueness, in the Swedish Holocaust Museum, that...

In this podcast episode, we talk about a letter dated 23 April 1945, from a man called Hans Fröhlicher to the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. Hans Frölicher was the Swiss ambassador to Germany during World War II. The neatly typed, official letter starts: ”I have the honour to enclose a copy of a communication that was secretly delivered to the Consulate General in Munich/Rottach-Egern. It concerns a cry of distress from non-German Jews deported to the territory of the Reich, who are being...

In this episode, Katharina Freise talks with Lidia Zessin-Jurek about some very special tefillin, which is the name given to two black leather boxes with straps which are put on by adult Jews for weekday morning prayers, and are worn on the forehead and upper arm. During her research into Polish Jewish refugees in the USSR, Lidia came across the story of the Polaniecki family, mother and father and four brothers (between fifteen and four years old at the time of the war). She got into contact...

In Life-Saving Linoleum, we talk about a seal forged out of linoleum by a man named Endre Káldori. We hear about how Káldori, with the watchmaker skills he learnt from his grandfather, a simple piece of linoleum, much luck, and an incredible amount of daredevilry, saved many family members and friends. Hungary joined the Axis Alliance in November 1940 and eventually, together with Germany, entered the state of war with the Soviet Union in June 1941. Following the catastrophic losses at ...

In this episode, we talk about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, well-known Holocaust survivor and author Simon Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower. On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. In this book, he recounted his experience with a mortally wounded Nazi soldier during World War II, and then asked prominent figures from politics, science and theology the question about what they would do under the circumstance. ...

Release date: 8 December 2022 | More about the Podcast Series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust In this EHRI Podcast episode, we will talk about the unique discovery of 33 vinyl discs, a hidden treasure in the archive of the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center, CDEC, in Milan. The discs contain recordings of interviews given in 1955 by six of the sixteen survivors of the rounding up of the Jews of Rome on 16 October 1943, the infamous “Black Saturday”. One of the testi...

In this episode, we talk about a photograph on the cover of a French magazine from 1938, showing two destitute looking women, stuck in so called No-Man’s Land. At the end of the 1930s, the emergence of “No Man’s Lands” symbolized the desperate situation of Jewish refugees who were expelled from countries throughout East and Central Europe. Photos, testimonies and other source material that give a voice to survivors who stayed in these No Man’s Lands are scarce. However, Gerard Friedenfe...

In this episode we are presenting a story from Belgium, that of Norbert Vos-Obstfeld, his family and his teddy bear. Norbert Vos was still a baby when on 10 May 1940 Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. The family was Jewish and the danger to them was imminent. After an attempt to flee, Norbert’s mother found herself alone with her baby boy; the rest of her family and husband were already deported. To save her life and that of Norbert, the mother knew she had to go into hiding and she desper...

In this episode, we will talk about mica-flakes, objects of little monetary value that were kept by survivors from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Also known as glimmer, the flakes, shiny glass-like, thin mineral sheets, were sliced from rocks with razor sharp blades by some women of the ghetto under forced labour conditions. On the one hand the flakes are a symbol of beauty, on the other of persecution and the ever present threat of not only food penalties beyond the normal rationing ...

In this podcast episode, we present the story of two Romanian boys, Sorel and Marcu Rozen, and a simple postcard. The Rozen family, made up of a grandmother, parents and two children, were deported from Dorohoi (a town in Northern Romania) in October 1941 to the Ghetto of Shargorod in Transnistria (now a Russian occupied part of Moldavia). Marcu and Sorel were 11 and 5 years old. The living conditions in the Shargorod Ghetto were dire and starvation and diseases rampant. Within months after a...

On 19 September 1941, Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, was occupied by the Nazi’s. Before then, Ukraine had been a reluctant part of the Soviet Union. Shortly after Nazi-Germany took hold of the city, it was decided to annihilate the Jews of Kyiv. On 29 and 30 September 1941, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered approximately 33,771 Jewish civilians by shooting them at a nearby ravine, called Babyn Yar. One of the main sources on the Babyn Yar massacre is the book Babi Yar. A Document in the F...

Listen to this trailer for an impression of For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust, a podcast by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). In this first season of six episodes, we speak with Holocaust researchers who talk passionately about a historic object that tells a very personal story about the Holocaust. Objects such as a teddy bear, mica glimmer, a magazine cover, gramophone records, a postcard and an old typewriter represent stories of the Shoah from all ov...