Moved here from another corner of Pat's website:
Stories of the Nazis, of Jewish Deaths, and of Survival
• As Children, They Fled the Nazis Alone. Newly Found Papers Tell Their Story. (Claire Moses, Reporting from London, NY Times, 3-19-25) Just under 10,000 Jewish children fled to Britain from Europe from December 1938 to September 1939. Not much was known about their journeys, until recently. More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Ms. Miley a renewed sense of grief. “One of the big losses when you’re taken away from your family so suddenly,” she said, “is that you don’t know the personality of your parents.”
• They Asked for Help to Escape the Nazis. Their Pleas Went Unanswered. (Nina Siegal, NY Times, 2-17-25) A new book focuses on the desperate letters written by many Jews seeking refuge in the Netherlands but who were denied entry after it closed its border in 1938. The frantic efforts of terrified Jews in Germany, Austria and other parts of Europe trying to escape persecution filled letter after letter that came in to the committee.
• Holocaust Death Toll on English Channel Island Is Raised by Hundreds (Claire Moses, Reporting from the Imperial War Museum in London, NY Times, 5-22-24) A panel of historians examining the Nazi occupation of the island of Alderney during World War II said it found more conclusive evidence of how many people were killed during the Nazi occupation of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands in British territory. The panel settled on a range of deaths that surpassed a previous estimate. It also documented the lack of prosecution after the war. The panel concluded that during the occupation between 1940 and 1945 between 7,608 and 7,812 forced laborers were killed. Most of them were forced laborers from the Soviet Union. That number also included 594 Jewish prisoners from France.
• The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now (Marc Tracy, NY Times, 10-20-24) Three generations on, filmmakers, writers and artists are making new meaning from ancestral trauma. Works of art about the Holocaust by or about the third generation have been made ever since survivors’ grandchildren (or grandnephews and -nieces) were old enough to make them. This is virtually a reading and watching list, and the link lets nonsubscribers read this piece.
• Holocaust Memorial Day: Kindertransport refugees who made Britain home (Tim Dodd, BBC News, 1-29-24) The Kindertransport (German for 'children's transport') was a series of rescue efforts between 1938 and 1940 that brought about 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany.
• French Holocaust denier who fled to Scotland jailed {BBC,3-20-25)
Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, in Fife, in November 2022 and handed over to French authorities last year after he lost a legal battle against his extradition. The 56-year-old was wanted for inciting hatred and denying the occurrence of the Holocaust. He was found guilty of denying war crimes, denying crimes against humanity, and incitement to racial hatred. The judge said that although it was not an offence to hold such views or to express them in certain contexts, it was a breach of Communications Act legislation to communicate them to the public on the internet. Lord Carloway also said seven videos featuring Reynouard amounted to an offence of relative seriousness by Scottish standards.
In one video he described Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as "the most slandered man" and said he wanted to "rehabilitate" National Socialism. Lawyers for Reynouard argued that the videos did not threaten serious disturbance to the community and did not constitute a call to action and that to extradite him would be disproportionate.
• Behind a Locked Door: The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children (Margaret Talbot, New Yorker, 10-2-23) As a girl in Austria, Evy Mages was confined to a mysterious institution in Innsbruck. Decades later, she learned why. In final part she documents how she searched for information about her roots.
"At the villa, Evy had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn’t wander. Socializing was virtually forbidden. Nobody ever told her the reason for these rules."
• Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor's Journey from Poland to America by Melvin Goldman and Lee Goldman Kikel. Also available, two history units on the Lodz Ghetto for use in classrooms, available through Teachers Pay Teachers
• No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi. (Silvia Foti, NY Times, 1-27-21) "On her deathbed in 2000, my mother asked me to take over writing a book about her father. I eagerly agreed. But as I sifted through the material, I came across a document with his signature from 1941 and everything changed. The story of my grandfather was much darker than I had known... In Lithuania, he was celebrated as a hero....I concluded that my grandfather was a man of paradoxes, just as Lithuania — a country caught between the Nazi and Communist occupations during World War II, then trapped behind the Iron Curtain for the next 50 years — is full of contradictions."
• We All Bleed Red: A Conversation with Heather Morris (Jane Ratcliffe, LA Review of Books, 1-30-22) Three sisters, Slovakian Jews, were carted off to Auschwitz. Their real-life story is captured in the gut-wrenching yet stubbornly hopeful novel Three Sisters. A Q&A interview, partly about abuse the women suffered in the camps. "You've got to acknowledge this! We allowed these women to go to their deaths 60 or 70 years later, carrying the shame of having been abused, when it was never their shame, it was ours."
• Cantor has one more lesson to share with his bar and bat mitzvah students: a personal look at the Holocaust (John Barry, St. Petersburg Times, 11-25-09)
• Cousins who survived Holocaust reunite in Broward after almost 70 years (Elinor Brecher, Miami Herald 3-11-12). The two men, who last saw each other in a concentration camp, fulfilled a dream Sunday in Tamarac as they met again, thanks to a memoir that one wrote.
• Echos of Memory (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) An ongoing collection of survivor reflections, memories, and testimonies, written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
• Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File (Allen Hershkowitz, New York Review of Books, 1-25-19) A detailed account of what a long-term survivor of the Nazi concentration camps went through and how he survived.
• Found in Translation (Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker, 12-23-19) Lithuanian cartoonist and translator iglė Anušauskaitė travelled to New York to find missing sections of young Jews’ autobiographies, hidden in Vilnius during the Second World War. A contest for the “best Jewish youth autobiography,” open to young men and women, was interrupted by Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. A group of Jews managed to smuggle out thousands of texts.
• A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion (Joseph Berger, NY Times, 10-18-17) "Many of the items, the experts said, offer glimpses into the hardscrabble everyday lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe when the region, not Israel or the Lower East Side, was the center of the Jewish world."
• The Nazis took a precious kettle from a Jewish couple. Some 86 years later, their grandson in Maryland got it back.(Sydney Page, Washington Post, 10-16-2020)
• A family hid their Bible in an attic as Nazis invaded. Almost 80 years later, it was reunited with the family’s heirs. (Nicole Asbury, Washington Post, 8-24-21) Listen or read.
• The Louvre is showing Nazi-looted art in a bid to find its owners. Some wonder why it took so long.(McAuley, 2-2-18)
• A Paris exhibit of Nazi-looted art honors a Europe many fear is under threat again (James McAuley, WaPo, 2-28-17)
• History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust What did American newspapers report about Nazi persecution during the 1930s and 1940s? You can help the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum answer this question. "History Unfolded is a project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded. Participants look in local newspapers for news and opinion about 32 different Holocaust-era events that took place in the United States and Europe, and submit articles they find to a national database, as well as information about newspapers that did not cover events."
• 'He Was Sent by God to Take Care of Us': Inside the Real Story Behind Schindler's List (Olivia B. Waxman, Time, 12-7-18) Twenty-five years later, the film is seen as a realistic depiction of life during the Holocaust, in terms of the brutality of the Nazis and the lifestyles of those they persecuted, though it does stray from the real story in a few big ways.
• His father brought hundreds of Jewish tailors to Canada - now he's stitching together their stories (Ryan Patrick Jones, CBC, 4-17-18) When Max Enkin led a Canadian delegation to the displaced persons camps of Europe in 1948, he was looking for more than tailors. The Tailor Project — formally known as the "garment workers' scheme" — was an immigration program that brought around 2,000 displaced people from Europe to Canada to work in the clothing industry. More than half were Jewish. It was the first program that permitted large numbers of Jewish adults to immigrate to Canada following the Second World War. "It opened the doors," said Larry Enkin, 89, the son of Max Enkin. "Slowly but surely Canada began to accept Jews as part of the community."
• Homecoming II (Henrietta Rose-Innes on the quiet secrets of her Cape Town home, Granta)
• Holocaust survivor breaks decades-long silence to share her horrific story (Buffalo News, 1-27-2018) For more than seven decades, Edith Fox kept her Holocaust story inside. To make sure people never forget the Holocaust, she finally told her story to Nina Trasoff, Fox’s “friendly visitor” through a Jewish Family and Children’s Services program in Tucson designed to keep Holocaust survivors active, and to family friend Sharon Price.
• Holocaust Survivor Reunites with the Family That Helped Hide Her from the Nazis After 73 Years (Lindsay Kimble, People magazine, 12-7-18) Charlotte Adelman, 86, was only 11 in 1943 when her Jewish family was separated, and her father orchestrated a daring escape to Eastern France, where she lived in hiding with the Quatrevilles for nearly two years. In November 2014, she received a message. The young boy whose family had hid her from the Nazis in a cellar for nine months during the Holocaust wanted to reconnect.
•The Holocaust Survivors Who Take Care of Their Own (Marina Kamenev, Narratively, 3-7-18) As the children of the war reach old age, one group of survivors is teaching nursing home workers how to treat a type of trauma that only they can understand. Australia has the largest per-capita survivor population outside of Israel, and those who were born during the Second World War are already in their seventies.
• Holocaust survivors will be able to share their stories after death thanks to a new project (video, Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes, 4-5-2020) Survivors of the Holocaust now have the chance to preserve their stories in a way that allows them to directly answer future generations' questions about their experiences.
• Learn about the Holocaust (links to resources, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) Scroll down for a cluster of resources on the Holocaust from the Holocaust Museum.
• Conducting an Interview (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, DC) Download (PDF) the museum's Oral History Interview Guidelines
• Arolsen Archives (International Center on Nazi Persecution) The archive in the town of Bad Arolsen says with help from Israel’s Yad Vashem, documents with information on more than 2.2 million people are now available online. Work is still being done to improve searchability. See brief story here: German Holocaust archive puts over 13 million documents online (Times of Israel, 5-21-19) Arolsen Archives makes available details and artifacts of about 2.2 million people, including Nazi concentration camp prisoner cards and death notices.
• Germany and the Holocaust: Informational and Primary Source Websites (University of Texas libraries)
• Navigating the Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Property (National Archives, USA)
• Holocaust Historical Data Goes Digital (AP story: "Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, the world's largest collection of Holocaust documents, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet."
• Sample Questions for Interviewing Holocaust Survivors (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
• Yad Vashem collections. Google "Yad Vashem" and photos and you'll find many resources.
• Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names
• Holocaust Oral History Projects
• Holocaust Encyclopedia (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
• "If you want to keep a memory as is, you carve it into a story. It’s not only keeping the content, it’s keeping the feeling alive. The best part is, you’re not the only one remembering it."— from neuroscientist Daniela Schiller's talk on "Keeping Memories Safe" (about Holocaust memories) on a Studio 360 radio program (NPR) featuring stories of neuroscience and memory
• Stories from the Holocaust (top left on this page of the website)
• Introduction to the Holocaust (Holocaust Encyclopedia, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
---The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany
---African Americans in Nazi Germany
---The Nazi Olympics Berlin 1936: African American Voices and "Jim Crow" America
---What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?
---The Reichstag Fire
---Nazi Party Platform
---Antisemitism
---Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution
---The Nuremberg Race Laws
---Postwar Trials
---International Military Tribunal
---Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
• Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor's Journey from Poland to America by Melvin Goldman and Lee Goldman Kikel. Also available, two history units on the Lodz Ghetto for use in classrooms, available through Teachers Pay Teachers.