Afleveringen
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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 city’s population.
In June 1940, Kovno's everyday life was horribly disrupted when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. When Nazi Germany took over a year later, and Gita was twelve years old, life for the Jewish community became impossible. Many were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and Kovno Ghetto was established to hold the Lithuanian Jews. During the summer of 1941, German occupation officials concentrated the remaining Jews, some 35,000 people, in a ghetto, an area of small, primitive houses and no running water. Kovno ghetto was officially sealed on August 15, 1941. Gita and her family were trapped inside.
Life in the ghetto was harsh and during several ‘Aktions’ thousands were again murdered. Still, those surviving, like Gita, tried to maintain a form of daily life and human dignity. In July 1944, the ghetto was evacuated and most of the remaining Jews were deported. Gita’s family was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).
Conditions in the camp were brutal. Gita’s parents and sister were murdered. Gita survived. And with her her ‘knizhicka’. In this small booklet, Gita recorded what she witnessed throughout the war. Not with elaborate words, but more like dry facts.
After the war, Gita returned to Kovno and later emigrated to Israel, where she married and had children. She kept the knizhicka with her until her death in 2020. Her daughter, Hasia Mandel, gave it to Yad Vashem for safekeeping after her mother had passed away.
Uniquely, Hasia and her two children Elhanan and Sharon (Gita’s grandchildren) can be heard in this podcast episode, reciting from the knizhicka.
Featured guests:
Ofer Lifshitz was until recently content producer and editor for the Gathering the Fragments Project of Yad Vashem, the World Holcoaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Ofer now works at Tel Aviv University.
Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 -
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 was opened in the summer of 2023. Many carry a message on one of the petals that is more or less similar to the one by Elizábeth: "Andi erinnerung liebe Vrou Wanda", not so good German for "of/for the memory of dear Mrs Wanda".
Elizábeth, called Bössi by family, Salomon, was Romanian and Jewish. We don't know much about her life until she was one of the prisoners of Bergen Belsen when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945. Like all prisoners in the camp, she was in a horrible condition, close to death.
Inthe summer of 1945, Sweden agreed to allow 10,000 ex-inmates of Belsen, Buchenwald and other German concentration camps to travel to Sweden and stay there for a period of six months recuperation. Elisabeth and a relative, possibly cousin, Laura, who also survived the camp, were brought on one of the so called White Boats to Sweden where they recovered in a hospital. It was here that they met Wanda Lanzer, an Austrian-Jewish woman who had sought and found refuge in neutral Sweden and was now involved in helping the survivors of the camps. Like many others, Elisabeth felt very grateful to Wanda and developed a special bond with her. She wrote to her also after her release from hospital and Wanda helped her with books and housing. After a while though, Elisabeth returned to Romania. We don’t know anything about her from then on.
The paper hearts are now part of the collection of the recently opened Swedish Holocaust Museum in Stockholm.
Featured guests:
Yael Fried is curator at the Sveriges Museum om Förintelsen, the Swedish Holocaust Museum. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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 held prisoner under deplorable conditions in various external commandos of the Dachau concentration camp.”
Enclosed with it was a typed copy of a, most likely handwritten letter that had reached Hans Fröhlicher against the odds. In this last phase of the war, prisoners from all over Europe, including survivors of the Ghettos in Eastern Europe and concentration camps such as Auschwitz, were driven to the interior of Germany and placed in already overcrowded camps such as Dachau. The situation in these camps became appalling and they were places of mass starvation, disease and killing, although not planned like in the extermination camps, but by complete and deliberate neglect. Therefore, the prisoners referred to these camps as Cold Crematoria.
This letter and the enclosed copy are now in the Swiss Federal Archives, as a lasting reminder of Jewish agency. Even though resistance was dangerous and difficult, Jews sought and found many ways to resist the intentions of the Nazi’s to dehumanize, humiliate and exterminate them.
Featured guest:
Johannes Meerwald is a scientific project officer for the EHRI project at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. He is a PhD Candidate at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt on the late phase of the Holocaust and the Jewish prisoners who were deported to southern Bavaria. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 -
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 with Salomon (Sam) Polaniecki, who today lives in the US. This Polish-Jewish family managed to survive the Holocaust in the USSR, first in Siberia, later in Tajikistan. Lidia has talked to Sam and his older brother Joseph many times. During their forced exile in the Soviet Union, Joseph made the tefillin of Siberian birch bark. Until 2013, the tefillin were in the possession of the family, the only object, apart from a few photos, they took back with them from the USSR when they returned to Poland after the war. The tefillin are now in the collection of Yad Vashem.
Featured guests:
Lidia Zessin-Jurek is a historian, researcher of memory (Holocaust, Gulag) and refugee movements in Polish lands past and present (refugees on Polish-Belarusian, Polish-Ukrainian borders). As part of an ERC project "Unlikely refuge?" (Czech Academy of Sciences, Masaryk Institute and Archives, Prague), she's developing a book on the refugeeism of Polish Jews in 1939.
Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 -
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 Stalingrad between 1942-43, the Hungarian regent tried to take the side of the Western Allies, but German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944.
The situation of the Hungarian Jews became increasingly difficult. Racial laws were passed between 1938 and 1941 and many Jewish men were forced into labour service. Initially, however, Hungarian Jews lived in relative safety as the Hungarian authority only targeted non-Hungarian Jews, but after March 1944, Hungarian Jews were also deported and killed, or isolated in special houses and ghettos. Endre did everything he could to save the lives of his family and those nearby. With a great amount of bravery, he forged documents and seals that helped people to get out of dangerous situations.
The seal is now part of the Endre Káldori Collection, a unique collection of written documents, photos and objects, in the archive of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. The collection consists of the hand-made linoleum seals, fake papers, blank forms of certificates, fake birth certificates etc. A unique object in the collection is a photo album. The album is full of photos and drawings prepared by Endre Káldori for his daughter Zsuzsanna and tells the story of the family's hiding during the Holocaust and the liberation.
Featured guest:
András Szécsényi is a research fellow in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security in Budapest and holds a Ph.D. degree from ELTE (Budapest). He has worked as Head of Collections in the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest between 2005 and 2017. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
For the testimony: Holocaust Documentation Center and Memorial Collection Public Foundation, Budapest, Hungary -
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. The “Sunflower” in the title referred to Wiesenthal's observation of a German military cemetery, where he saw a sunflower on each grave, while he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp near Lviv and feared for his own body to end up in an unmarked mass grave. The book touched many people, some of whom then expressed their emotions by sending sunflowers, real or crafted, to Wiesenthal’s office.
The sunflowers are now part of the collection of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI) in Austria.
Featured guests:
Marianne Windsperger works as a research coordinator at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). Kinga Frojimovics is a historian and senior archivist and project leader at the VWI.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Studs Terkel Radio Archive, courtesy of Chicago History Museum and WFMT for the radio-interview with Simon Wiesenthal. 1976 -
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 testimonies is by Cesare and Lello Di Segni, father and son, who gave account of how they survived the Holocaust.
These very early testimonies of the Holocaust were found by accident by Laura Brazzo, head of the Archive and Digital Library of the CDEC Foundation.
Featured guest: Laura Brazzo, Head of the Archive and Digital Library, CDEC Foundation, Milan, Italy. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Laura will tell the story of Cesare and Lello Di Segni and how she rediscovered their voices on the lost records.
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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 Friedenfeld, who in 1938 found himself trapped in one of the No-Man’s Lands as a 14 year old boy, has given a harrowing account of his experiences and we can listen to his testimony.
Host Katharina Freise is joined by Michal Frankl, Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who investigates No-Man’s Lands and the fate of the refugees who ended up in these desolate places.
Featured guest: Michal Frankl, Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the principle investigator of the project Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century, which is supported by the European Research Council. Podcast host is Katharina Freise
Michal will tell the story of Gerard Friedenfeld and the women on the magazine cover, trying to bring alive the situation in the No Man’ Lands.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). -
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 desperately tried to find a place. After several disastrous attempts, she and Norbert, almost by chance, finally found a relatively safe haven with a café-owner and his wife and daughter. It was with this family that they managed to survive the war, and that Norbert received a present from the little girl of the family: a teddy bear, a gift that he and the girl would hold on to for the rest of their lives until they donated it to Kazerne Dossin.
The teddy bear is now part of the collection of Kazerne Dossin: Memorial, Museum and Research Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Belgium, where it is one of the most beloved pieces.
Featured guest: Veerle Vanden Daelen, Deputy Director and Director Collections & Research at Kazerne Dossin. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig
Veerle will tell the story of Norbert Vos and his teddy bear, that came into the collection of the museum.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). -
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 but, deportation to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, should the women make a mistake.
Several of these mica-flakes are now in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, donated by the survivors or their children. Robert Ehrenreich, who works for the museum, has done extensive research into the mica-flakes and the stories of the women who kept them after their liberation from Theresienstadt.
Featured guest: Robert Ehrenreich, Director, National Academic Programs, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The views expressed in this podcast are those of Robert Ehrenreich and do not reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Robert will tell the story of Emma Jonas and her mica-flakes that came into the collection of the museum.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). -
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 arrival, the grandmother and parents died of typhoid, the boys were left alone. Desperate for help, Marcu wrote a postcard to his uncle in Bucharest, with the message to “do everything in your power to take us out”.
This postcard is now part of the collection of The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, in Bucharest.
Featured guest: Ana Bărbulescu, Senior Researcher and Head of the Research Department at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.
Ana will tell the story of Marcu Rozen and the postcard to his uncle.
Interview of Marcu Rozen is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu/
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions
Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). -
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 Form of a Novel, by A. Anatoli (Anatoly Kuznetsov). Kuznetsov was born in Kyiv and fourteen years old at the time of Babyn Yar. Later he wrote an extensive eyewitness account, complemented with research, of wartime Kyiv (1941-1943) and what occurred at Babyn Yar. His typewriter is now part of the collection of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War.
Featured guest: Karel Berkhoff, Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Co-Project Director EHRI.
Karel talks about Babyn Yar and Kuznetsov.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions
Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). -
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 over Europe, from Belgium to Ukraine, from Romania to Italy.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions
Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
