United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Within hours of being separated from her family at Auschwitz, another prisoner bluntly told Ruth Cohen that her mother, ...
01/24/2025

Within hours of being separated from her family at Auschwitz, another prisoner bluntly told Ruth Cohen that her mother, brother, and cousins were already dead.

Fourteen-year-old Ruth could not believe it. The truth of Auschwitz, a camp where the N***s tried to kill as many Jews as possible, was beyond her imagination.

Ruth survived Auschwitz along with her older sister, Teresa. On Monday, Ruth is returning to the camp for the first time in the 80 years since it was liberated. But Auschwitz has never been far from her mind.

“It’s constantly with me.”

"I am a Jewish boy … and I beg you to do this favor for me … " 17-year-old Erwin Haber wrote this desperate plea and att...
01/23/2025

"I am a Jewish boy … and I beg you to do this favor for me … "

17-year-old Erwin Haber wrote this desperate plea and attached it to a series of letters addressed to his sister, grandmother, and landlady.

Then, he tossed the bundle of letters out of a deportation train bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau, hoping someone would find his letters and deliver them.

Despite his own fear and anxiety, Erwin's letters reassured his family. He wrote, "My dear ones! Don’t lose hope, everything will be alright."

Erwin quickly learned that his circumstances were much worse than he could have ever imagined.

Shortly after his arrival at Auschwitz, Erwin began performing forced labor. N**i records indicate that Erwin died on September 10, 1942, just 37 days after he arrived at the notorious camp.

Erwin would never know that his letters eventually reached his sister and grandmother, who survived the Holocaust in hiding.

“We have talked. We have sympathized. We have expressed our horror. The time to act is long past due.” —John Pehle  in 1...
01/22/2025

“We have talked. We have sympathized. We have expressed our horror. The time to act is long past due.” —John Pehle

in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board (WRB) to provide relief for Jews and others targeted by N**i Germany. The WRB's creation was the first time the United States adopted a policy of trying to rescue victims of N**i persecution.

John Pehle (pictured here) was appointed as WRB's first director. Under his leadership, the WRB streamlined the work of private relief agencies, helping them send money and resources into neutral and enemy territory. It also placed American representatives in neutral nations to supervise projects and pressure these countries to welcome refugees.

It is estimated the the WRB helped save thousands of lives during the Holocaust. However, according to Pehle after the war, the actions of the WRB were "little and late.”

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

They are among the few who survived Auschwitz and can speak about it today.Ruth Cohen, Steven Fenves, and Irene Weiss we...
01/21/2025

They are among the few who survived Auschwitz and can speak about it today.

Ruth Cohen, Steven Fenves, and Irene Weiss were teenagers when their families were rounded up in Hungary in 1944 and sent to the notorious concentration camp.

As the Germans barked at them to exit the crowded rail cars, none of them realized it was the last moments their families would be whole.

Join us on International Holocaust Remembrance Day to learn the stories of three survivors—and remember the nearly one million Jews murdered at Auschwitz. Watch live on Facebook on January 27, at noon ET.

Reply with your questions for our experts, and they'll answer during the show.

Photo: Yad Vashem

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Elie Wiesel was forced on a death march out of Auschwitz 80 years ago  . He and his father, Shlomo, were made to walk mi...
01/18/2025

Elie Wiesel was forced on a death march out of Auschwitz 80 years ago . He and his father, Shlomo, were made to walk miles on foot in the freezing cold.

"I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much," Elie wrote in his book "Night." "If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities—my body and me. I hated it."

With Soviet forces approaching and the German army in retreat, SS guards sent more than 60,000 prisoners away from Auschwitz, westward into Germany in mid-January 1945. A smaller number of prisoners, most of whom were too sick to move, remained behind.

Elie and Shlomo were later placed in open freight cars, which rolled through German towns and past German civilians. “They would stop and look at us without surprise,” Elie wrote. “One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it … Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The workers watched the spectacle with great interest.”

They arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp in late January—around the time Auschwitz was liberated. Shortly after their arrival, Shlomo died in the middle of the night. Elie was liberated at Buchenwald in April 1945.

Photos: Elie Wiesel

If you don't know the name Raoul Wallenberg, you’re missing out on one of the most significant rescue stories of the Hol...
01/17/2025

If you don't know the name Raoul Wallenberg, you’re missing out on one of the most significant rescue stories of the Holocaust.

A Swedish businessman turned diplomat, Wallenberg led a daring mission in Budapest, Hungary. Sometimes the work involved creating legal-looking documents to fool the authorities. Other times, Wallenberg negotiated with the N***s and their Hungarian collaborators to save Jews.

By the time Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944, about 200,000 Jews remained in the city in extreme danger. To help protect them, Wallenberg issued documents from the neutral Swedish government. With funds from his government and the US War Refugee Board, he and his large network of helpers created more than 30 safe houses under Swedish protection and established hospitals and a soup kitchen.

When the Hungarians began deporting Jews from Budapest in fall 1944, Wallenberg intervened—often personally—to secure the release of Jews with Swedish documents or forged papers.

One time, he intervened to save Jews being executed on the bank of the Danube River. He asked his staff, "How many of you can swim?"

Wallenberg disappeared in January 1945 as Soviet forces conquered Budapest. He was last seen in the company of Soviet officials and later died in Soviet custody.

Photo: Yad Vashem

As families hugged goodbye and people hastily wrote letters to loved ones, photographer Mendel Grossman captured their f...
01/16/2025

As families hugged goodbye and people hastily wrote letters to loved ones, photographer Mendel Grossman captured their final moments in the Łódź ghetto.

In January 1942, German authorities began deporting Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chełmno killing center. By the end of September 1942, they had deported approximately 70,000 Jews from Łódź to Chełmno. Though personal photography was banned in the ghetto, Mendel secretly documented these scenes.

Mendel did not survive the Holocaust. After the ghetto's final liquidation in 1944, he was deported to Königs Wusterhausen, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Mendel likely died on a death march during the camp's evacuation in 1945.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Leopold Page Photographic Collection

You may know the words of this famous quote, but do you know the story behind it? German pastor Martin Niemöller, born  ...
01/14/2025

You may know the words of this famous quote, but do you know the story behind it?

German pastor Martin Niemöller, born in 1892, at first supported Hi**er and the N**i regime. But when the N***s interfered in church affairs, he began to criticize them. In 1937, the N**i secret police arrested Niemöller for his opposition. He spent almost eight years in prisons and concentration camps.

The full transformation of Niemöller’s beliefs came late—only after he was liberated by the Allies in 1945 and learned of the death and destruction caused by N**i policies.

Niemöller’s famous quote is a confession of his own inaction. In times of turmoil, we turn to his words.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller

“More of our men died—so fast that you couldn’t keep track of their numbers.” Eighty years ago  , the Germans captured U...
01/08/2025

“More of our men died—so fast that you couldn’t keep track of their numbers.”

Eighty years ago , the Germans captured US Army medic Tony Acevedo during the Battle of the Bulge. Tony, along with other members of his regiment, was held prisoner for 15 weeks—first at a prisoner of war camp, and then some were sent to a forced labor subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp known as Berga an der Elster.

They were beaten, tortured, and forced to do hard labor. Tony was sexually assaulted. Much of what we know about their experiences is thanks to the secret diary Tony kept while in captivity.

In his diary, Tony recorded names and death dates as the men succumbed to pneumonia, heart conditions, and malnutrition despite his medical care. Some men who tried to escape were captured and shot.

Tony wrote that he feared “our bodies would [not] resist any more.”

In April 1945, as American troops closed in, Tony and the other prisoners were sent on a forced march that lasted more than two weeks and claimed the lives of about 80 American soldiers.

Tony survived the march and later shared his story with our Museum.

Photo: USHMM, gift of Tony Acevedo

In spring 1943, Thomas Blatt arrived at the Sobibor killing center. It didn't look the way he had imagined it. "The sun ...
01/05/2025

In spring 1943, Thomas Blatt arrived at the Sobibor killing center. It didn't look the way he had imagined it. "The sun was still high in the sky, birds were singing. It was such a beautiful spring day."

"I think, 'This can't be a death camp,'" recalled Thomas.

Then, Thomas saw smoke rising from the crematoria: "I didn't want to die."

Thomas (born Tomasz Blatt) was born in Izbica, a Polish town with a large Jewish community. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the occupying German authorities forced Izbica's Jewish population, including Thomas, his parents, and younger brother, into a ghetto.

The Izbica ghetto was a transit point for Jews from surrounding towns and other parts of Europe, from which they were deported to killing centers. In April 1943, Thomas and his family were sent to Sobibor. Thomas, then a teenager, was one of the few people selected to work as a forced laborer at the killing center.

That October, prisoners staged an armed revolt. Thomas and others attempted to escape by running through one of the holes cut in a barbed wire fence. The fence fell on top of Thomas, trapping him, but he managed to free himself by sliding out of his coat.

Thomas was one of about 50 prisoners who escaped Sobibor and survived the Holocaust. His parents and brother were among the approximately 167,000 Jews gassed on arrival at Sobibor.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Tomasz (Toivi) Blatt

After he was blinded in a childhood accident at the age of eight, Jacques Lusseyran constructed a vivid inner world. “Li...
01/04/2025

After he was blinded in a childhood accident at the age of eight, Jacques Lusseyran constructed a vivid inner world. “Life,” he wrote, “did not fall on my face as cool as rain or into my hands as round as fruit, but was a wave rising inside me.” He developed a strong memory and a passion for languages.

Jacques was 15 years old when German forces invaded his native France in May 1940 and, by the age of 17, he and a group of friends had founded a Resistance group. Jacques was put in charge of recruitment due to his ability to hear what he called “moral music.” Through perceptive listening, he could identify deceit or sincerity in a potential recruit’s tone of voice.

In July 1943, Jacques and several other Resistance leaders were arrested by the Gestapo. He was eventually transported to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was assigned to the so-called Invalids’ Block. Despite the wretched conditions of the camp, Jacques made the best of his situation. He put his memory and language skills to work by translating and deciphering war updates for his fellow prisoners.

He later wrote, “I became ‘the blind Frenchman.’ For many, I was just ‘the man who didn’t die.’ Hundreds of people confided in me. The men were determined to talk to me. They spoke to me in French, in Russian, in German, in Polish. I did the best I could to understand them all. That is how I lived, how I survived. The rest I cannot describe.”

Photo: Jacques Lusseyran

Beno Helmer thought he was his family's sole survivor. That changed on New Year's Day in 1947.About three years earlier,...
01/01/2025

Beno Helmer thought he was his family's sole survivor. That changed on New Year's Day in 1947.

About three years earlier, as Beno stepped from the railcar at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center, he was surrounded by his family for the last time.

"They put us in lines. ... And they separated us. And I didn't want to leave my mother," Beno remembered decades later, breaking into tears.

Beno was directed one way while he watched a German SS official direct his mother, father, and brother in the opposite direction. “What he did to my sister, I didn’t see.”

Beno survived Auschwitz, other camps, and forced labor. After the war, he visited town after town, searching for his family. One day, outside a displaced person camp in Germany, a man yelled from a truck, “How’s Sonia?” Beno replied that his sister was dead. The man said, “I just saw her.”

Beno wasn’t sure what to believe, but he kept searching.

During another chance encounter, he met a woman who said she knew Sonia and that she was hosting a New Year’s Eve party in a town a train ride away. Beno and the woman went to the station and discovered trains weren't running because of the holiday.

The next morning, when they arrived, a woman answered the door and called for Sonia to greet her guests. Sonia said "hello" when she came to the door. At first, she “didn’t realize it was me,” Beno remembered. Then Sonia fainted.

On New Year’s Day 1947, Beno was reunited with his sister.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Beno Helmer

“Out of our memory and understanding we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will th...
12/29/2024

“Out of our memory and understanding we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way or fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.”

We mourn the passing of President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, whose presidential commission recommended establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In 1978, President Carter created the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and charged it with the responsibility to oversee “the establishment and maintenance of an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust.” The commission, chaired by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, included other survivors, lay and religious leaders, historians, and members of Congress. It recommended establishing a “living memorial” that would ensure this history’s timeless lessons are taught in perpetuity.

President Carter accepted the recommendations of the commission’s report and, as a result of his leadership, in 1980 a unanimous act of Congress created the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversaw the Museum’s creation.

Holocaust survivors Vladka and Benjamin Meed are pictured here with President Carter at a White House Rose Garden ceremony marking the official presentation of the report of the commission to the president by its chairman, Elie Wiesel, in 1979.

Photo: Jimmy Carter Library

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During Hanukkah in 1931, Rabbi Akiva Posner’s family placed their menorah near the window, as many Jewish families do in...
12/26/2024

During Hanukkah in 1931, Rabbi Akiva Posner’s family placed their menorah near the window, as many Jewish families do in an outward sign of their faith. But this was not any year.

That year, the N***s were making their presence known in Kiel, where the N**i Party was especially popular. Through the rabbi's window, a sw****ka flag flew from a building just across the street where the local N**i Party had an office. Hi**er had not yet risen to power in Germany, but in Posner’s community of Kiel tensions were rising.

In the years to come, Posner, a leading rabbi in the city, publicly opposed the N**i Party's acts of discrimination against the town’s Jewish community. He wrote a letter of protest in the local press after posters appeared outside certain establishments declaring "Jews may not enter."

Tensions in the city turned to violence and state-sponsored discrimination. Rabbi Posner urged members of his community to leave N**i Germany, and the Posner family fled in 1933. The menorah was one of the treasured possessions they carried with them.

Rabbi Posner’s wife, Rachel, wrote on the back of the photo:

"Death to Judah"
So the flag says
"Judah will live forever"
So the light answers

For more than 90 years, the Posner family has continued to light the candles on this same menorah.

Photos: USHMM, courtesy of Shulamith Posner-Mansbach

It’s a timeless image: children smiling next to a Christmas tree. But this photograph saved a family's life.Mosa Mandil ...
12/25/2024

It’s a timeless image: children smiling next to a Christmas tree. But this photograph saved a family's life.

Mosa Mandil ran a photo studio in Novi Sad, a town northwest of Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia. Though the Mandils were Jewish, Mosa took this portrait of his children, Gavra and Irena, in the fall of 1940 to promote his photography business for the upcoming Christmas season.

When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Mandil family fled. As they traveled south by train, SS officers detained them and demanded to see their papers. When the Germans accused them of being Jewish, Mosa showed them the photograph of his children by the Christmas tree as "proof" that they weren't. The Germans let them go.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Gavra Mandil

In December 1943, Berl Gempel made a daring escape that likely saved his life.Before the war, Berl lived in Kovno (Kauna...
12/24/2024

In December 1943, Berl Gempel made a daring escape that likely saved his life.

Before the war, Berl lived in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, with his parents and older brother. When the German Army invaded in 1941, Berl and his family were forced into the Kovno ghetto. Berl joined the resistance and after almost two years in the ghetto attempted to flee.

After he was caught, Berl was interrogated and tortured by the German authorities for more than two weeks. To protect his family, he tore up and ate the photos of his parents and brother that he carried with him. Nevertheless, they did not survive the Holocaust.

Berl was then sent to the Ninth Fort, an old fortification on the outskirts of the city. There, German authorities tortured and conducted mass killings of Kovno’s Jewish population. Berl was temporarily spared, as he was assigned to a forced labor unit that exhumed bodies from mass graves and burned them in order to cover up evidence of N**i crimes.

However, Berl knew it was only a matter of time before he too would be murdered. He, along with other members of the unit, began planning their escape through the fort’s complex tunnel system.

They set the date of their escape as December 25—Christmas. As the Germans were celebrating that night, the prisoners, including Berl, fled through tunnels under the fort before scaling the fort’s walls using a makeshift rope ladder.

Many of the escapees were later captured, but Berl was not. He joined the partisans for the rest of the war. Shortly after liberation, Berl revisited the Ninth Fort and is pictured here (second from the left) with some of his fellow escapees. Berl believed that only seven or eight of the approximately 60 people to escape Ninth Fort that night survived until the end of the war.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum)

Leo Bretholz became an escape artist out of necessity. As an Austrian Jew on the run from N**i persecution, his life was...
12/21/2024

Leo Bretholz became an escape artist out of necessity. As an Austrian Jew on the run from N**i persecution, his life was perpetually in danger. He illegally crossed international borders, jumped out of trains, swam across the Sauer River in the dead of night, and lived under several aliases—all to avoid falling into N**i hands. But time and time again, the war caught up to him.

Eventually, Leo found himself imprisoned in Vichy France.

During this time when Leo was too physically weak to break out, paper and ink became his means of mental escape. After he was transferred out of solitary confinement, Leo created this crossword puzzle with another cellmate. He wrote, “Another cellmate mentioned his enjoyment of crossword puzzles. We created our own, and exchanged them, trying to stimulate our brains and pass the endless hours.”

Leo survived the rest of the war in France and immigrated to the United States in 1947.

Photos: USHMM, courtesy of Leo Bretholz

12/18/2024

Holocaust survivor Ayana Touval was just a toddler when N**i Germany and its allies invaded her native Yugoslavia.

Watch live to learn how Ayana and her family evaded capture by the N***s and their collaborators.

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