The Wiener Holocaust Library

26/04/2025

📨 Our May newsletter will be on its way to inboxes next week!

Subscribe now to find out about forthcoming events, exhibitions, academic talks, and news about our unique collections every month: www.wienerholocaustlibrary.org/

25/04/2025

📣 New event in-person at the Library and online!

On 27 May we will be hosting a panel presentation of new, cutting-edge research on the Holocaust in Hungary, in particular the role of transportation in accelerating the Final Solution there.

Researchers will present their new findings on the deportation of Jews by train in Hungary in 1944, with specific focus on the train that left Debrecen, headed to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that was diverted instead to Strasshof concentration camp in Vienna.

Using mixed methodologies, the researchers, including historians, engineers, educators – and a survivor of that very train, Agnes Kaposi, present their work from diverse backgrounds and disciplines.

📸 By Bernhard Walter - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (photograph number 77319), Public Domain, WIkimedia Commons

Sign up for your free tickets now: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/hybrid-event-a-quirk-of-history-the-logistics-of-destruction-in-hungary/

25/04/2025

Our May newsletter will be heading to subscribers next week!

Make sure you are signed up to receive all of our latest news and updates:

The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust, the N**i era and genocide. The Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony.

24/04/2025

Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs) were the second-largest group of victims of N**i genocidal policies.

It is estimated that, of 5.7 million Soviet POWs, 3.3 million died as a result of deliberate maltreatment and murder by the N**is between 1941 and 1945.

The deaths of Soviet POWs in German custody during the Second World War represent one of the highest rates of casualties ever recorded during a mass atrocity.

Our latest addition to our educational site explores the treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War in the German Reich. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/life-in-nazi-occupied-europe/oppression/soviet-prisoners-of-war/

24/04/2025

📣 New Academic Book Talk!

In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s.

The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence.

Sign up to attend a talk with the author next month, either online or in-person at the Library: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/hybrid-book-talk-vanishing-vienna-with-frances-tanzer/

23/04/2025

The remarkable story of Alice and Hans Finke, who met in Belsen DP camp, is featured in our latest exhibition.

Find out more in this video ➡️➡️

23/04/2025

22/04/2025

📍 New event just announced!

Join us for an evening talk on 22 May with Menachem Rosensaft, author of Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, who will discuss his book in conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg.

This event will explore Rosensaft’s reflections on faith, memory, and resilience in the aftermath of the trauma of the Shoah.

Sign up for tickets now: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/book-talk-burning-psalms-menachem-rosensaft-in-conversation-with-rabbi-jonathan-wittenberg/

22/04/2025

🗓️ New Academic Book Talk

The Berlin book burning and the raiding of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for sexual science (“Institut für Sexualwissenschaft”) in May 1933 is part and parcel of German memorial culture.

Due to a rehabilitation and revival of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), noticeable in Germany in recent years, many Germans now know that the pivotal LGBT-rights precursor activist died in 1935 in exile in Nice (France), heavily traumatized by the destruction of his life work by the N**is in Germany.

Hans Soetart's latest work is the very first book reporting in detail on what happened in the years 1932–1935 before Hirschfeld’s death and, especially, during the seven years that followed his death.

Join us for a discussion of this important new book at the Library this June: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/book-talk-the-scattered-library-with-hans-soetaert/

22/04/2025

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, join us for a film screening of The Silent Village featuring guest speakers at Theatr Soar, Merthyr Tydfil.

In partnership with the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Josef Herman Foundation and the Welsh Jewish Cultural Centre we will present The Silent Village, which remembers the Lidice massacre, whereby a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the N**is in 1942.

The film sees the villagers of Cwmgiedd, Southwest Wales, ingeniously retell and re-enact the tragic story as if happening in Cwmgiedd.

Sign up via our website https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/ve-day-80-remembering-the-silent-village-the-story-of-wales-and-lidice/

21/04/2025

Born in Łódź, Poland in 1923, Chava Rosenfarb was one of the most important Yiddish novelists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

She was a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen and her primary subject was the Holocaust.

Her daughter, Goldie Morgentaler translated the diary which her mother wrote in Belsen DP camp after liberation and joins us at the Library next month to discuss her mother's life and work.

Part of the Traces of Belsen exhibition series, this talk will take place for an online audience on 13 May. Sign up now via our website: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/exhibition-online-talk-goldie-morgentaler-discusses-the-life-and-work-of-her-mother-chava-rosenfarb/

21/04/2025

There are many ways you can support the Library to ensure we can continue our vital work, from becoming a member, supporting our ongoing Digital Transformation Project to making a donation.

Explore how you can help now:

As a charity we rely on friends and volunteers to support our work.

20/04/2025

📣 New Academic Book Talk!

We're pleased to announce a lecture next month with Dr Florian Zabransky on his new book Jewish Men and the Holocaust: Sexuality, Emotions, Masculinity.

During the Holocaust, amid death and violence, Jewish men were not mere powerless victims. Linking gender studies with a history of sexuality and emotions will highlight intimate agency, power struggles, negotiations of relationships, social dynamics, and representations of masculinities. Considering the agency and vulnerability will further convey intimate choices, the representation of masculine ideals, intimate violence, and the expression of various emotions such as honour and love.

The analysis not only demonstrates how Jewish men remember and make sense of their experiences, but also how they chose to form the narrative and how they represented their ordeal in four chapters, namely ghettos, concentration camps, Jewish resistance in the countryside, and finally, DP camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Sign up via our website: https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/event/book-talk-jewish-men-and-the-holocaust-sexuality-emotions-sexuality-with-florian-zabransky/

19/04/2025

Missed our last newsletter?

Subscribe now to ensure all of our latest news about forthcoming events and exhibitions, acquisitions, new additions to our digital archive, and more, arrives straight to your inbox! https://buff.ly/tYYiRYk

18/04/2025

Harry Harrison (né Heinz Nadel) was born in 1910 into a Jewish family in Berlin. He became a house father at a Jewish orphanage in Berlin-Pankow.

Harry fled to Great Britain in 1939. His brother Theo escaped to Australia before the war.

Harry arrived in Dover in May 1939 and was sent to Richborough Refugee Camp. He joined the Pioneer Corps in 1940 and later the British Intelligence where he was involved in the distribution of anti-N**i propaganda material.

Heinz Nadel anglicised his name to Harry, taking on the surname, Harrison, from his army friend Edward (Ted) Harrison.

In May to September 1945, Harry was stationed at Bergen Belsen Displaced Persons camp where he catered to the needs of the recently liberated camp population.

Find more refugee stories related to our current exhibition via www.refugeemap.org, search 'Belsen'.

18/04/2025

📷 Photo from Bergen-Belsen camp, c.1942: subject is an unknown Soviet Prisoner of War; photographer unknown, courtesy of Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation / Documentation Centre Celle.

The POW camp at Bergen-Belsen was one of a number of camps ran by the Wehrmacht (the German military) in the local area.

In these camps, disease was rife, food in very short supply and shelter inadequate, and prisoners were forced into labour service. Conditions for Soviet slave labourers in Germany were considerably worse than those experienced by POWs from other nations and civilian forced labourers.

By the end of the Second World War, three million of the 5.7 million Soviet Prisoners of War in German captivity had died. For the most part, they were victims of a deliberately genocidal policy of mass starvation and maltreatment.

Find out more from our latest exhibition, Traces of Belsen, on display until July 2025. https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/exhibition/traces-of-belsen/

17/04/2025

W***y Meisl was a trailblazing Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who revolutionised the field during the Weimar Republic.

Known as the "King of the Sports Journalists," Meisl’s influence was unmatched. But with the rise of the N**is, his focus shifted. Forced into exile, he turned his sharp pen to the roots of N**ism, its reign of terror, and the myths of racial ideology that upended his life.

A new book gathers Meisl's most powerful writings. A forgotten pioneer of interwar journalism, Meisl’s work remains as urgent and insightful today as it was in his time.

Join us at JW3 in June as authors Darren O’ Bryne and Christopher Young will be in conversation with David Bolchover, author, commentator and business writer. His latest book is “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory”, a biography of the football coach Béla Guttmann. The book was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. David is currently writing a book on great Jewish footballers throughout Europe who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Sign up now:

W***y Meisl was a trailblazing Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who revolutionised the field during the Weimar Republic. A product of Vienna’s vibrant coffeehouse culture, he brought intellectual depth to sports writing, exploring professionalism, tactics, and sporting history with the flair of a...

17/04/2025

"The margin of strength by which I survived was so small that no doubt any additional strain would have killed me straight away..."

F***y Heilbut and her family were deported to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. In her eyewitness account, given to Library researchers in the 1950s, she described the horrendous conditions of the camp.

Explore our full testimony collection 🔗 https://buff.ly/G7HCrEX