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The EHRI document blog is a space to share ideas about Holocaust-related archival documents, and their presentation and interpretation using digital tools.
Updated: 2 hours 22 min ago

Integrating new data from Yad Vashem’s archives into the EHRI portal – methods and practice

July 3, 2019 - 5:12pm
Introduction The export activity of Yad Vashem had two goals. Firstly, we wanted to update the Yad Vashem content on the EHRI portal, improving the quality of the descriptions and adding a few new records. Secondly, we wanted to prepare the infrastructure to have a sustainable connection to the EHRI portal, allowing content updates and Read More

First Call for Resistance to the Nazis in the Vilna Ghetto: “Let us Not Go Like Sheep to the Slaughter”

June 12, 2019 - 1:50pm
On the cold night of 31 December 1941 a group of about 150 young Jews crowded in the small kitchen of Vilna Ghetto, in Straszuna Str. No.2. They pretended to be celebrating the New Year’s Eve, to distract the attention Read More

Files of the Austrian “Concentration Camp Association”

May 15, 2019 - 2:16pm
“We confirm the receipt of your registration to our state association and welcome you as a fellow sufferer. We would only like to ask you for further information of your reason for arrest; ‘political’ – as you state is too Read More

“Historical Meaning Beyond the Personal”: Survivor Agency and Mediation in the Wiener Library’s Early Testimonies Collection

April 17, 2019 - 10:01am
“I am still so completely under the impression of your terrible suffering that every word that I could thank you with for this [report] seems inadequate….You have thus demonstrated that you have faced up to a moral task, which, as Read More

Repatriation Efforts – Luxembourg State Policy Towards Jews during World War II

March 29, 2019 - 2:53pm
“When we returned to Luxembourg, our native country, we got off the train and went to the school building. We had no identification and a person wrote down in our papers Jew and Polish because my parents came from Poland. Read More

Pecunia Olet: Aryanizing Jewish Shops in Gödöllő, Hungary

March 5, 2019 - 10:59am
Intro In March 1942, the town council of Gödöllő decided to cancel the rent of those Jewish shopkeepers whose shops were located on the ground floor of the city hall. During the preparations, the council ordered a drawing of the Read More

Georeferencing Service for Archives

February 12, 2019 - 12:38pm
Archives often have the wish to make their collections searchable and findable on a map like Google Maps or Open Street Map. This is a nice interface for users on which they can zoom in on a specific geographic location Read More

Messages from the Ghetto – Viennese transports to the General Government in early 1941

January 22, 2019 - 3:17pm
“It is impossible in just a few sentences to come close to being able to describe the individual tragic episodes of this transport. We ask that these people, who – so unprepared and without fault – have been forced out Read More

Witnessing the Eve of Destruction. Ernő Munkácsi’s “How It Happened”

December 15, 2018 - 7:53pm
Introduction This blog post is devoted to the key publication and original sources of one of the major eyewitness chroniclers of the Holocaust in Hungary.  In his book of 1947, Ernő Munkácsi, a leading official of the Jewish Congregation of Pest Read More

BeGrenzte Flucht: integrating Austrian and Czechoslovak documentation on 1938 refugees

November 19, 2018 - 9:09am
The journalist Richard Bermann was one of the many Austrians threatened by the Nazi regime who tried in vain to flee on the night train to Czechoslovakia the night of the 11th March 1938. After approximately 180 Austrian refugees were turned... Continue reading →

Recognising the ‘Anonymous’ Resistors: Everyday Heroes in Occupied Hungary

October 30, 2018 - 10:22am
On 9th July 1944, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest and began work on a rescue project that would protect thousands of Hungarian Jews. His efforts have been the subject of many books, monuments and films, rightly recognizing his heroism. Yet,... Continue reading →

Transports from Mechelen

October 10, 2018 - 3:32pm
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportations to the East from the central assembly camp in Belgium for Jews, Roma and Sinti Kazerne Dossin started a series of online publications to mark these events. Around the date of departure... Continue reading →

“Re-Germanization” and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle Camps: The Geography of Expulsion

September 4, 2018 - 3:07pm
“Extermination and assimilation were two sides of the same coin.”1 The author of this alarming phrase is one of the very few scholars who have written in English2 about the ‘re-Germanization” program run in part by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic... Continue reading →

Using Named Entity Recognition to Enhance Access to a Museum Catalog

August 27, 2018 - 12:46pm
Introduction Digital technologies are successfully applied in cultural heritage projects supporting digitization of cultural objects, metadata creation, metadata maintenance, creation of digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research and many others. When we discuss archival digital textual content, some of the... Continue reading →

A wartime diary of two Dutch Jews in hiding

July 31, 2018 - 5:15pm
“[T]he moment on 10 September 1942 we stepped out of the train in Aalten, I thought: ‘Is the war still going on? Does the persecution of the Jews still exist? Here, everything is so quiet and so different from what... Continue reading →

Correspondence Across Ghetto Walls

July 10, 2018 - 9:56am
Officially censored postcards addressed from or to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, are items that are well-represented in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Correspondence, which was the only option inmates had of communicating with the outside world, was... Continue reading →

The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen

June 19, 2018 - 2:46pm
Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had... Continue reading →

Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database

May 29, 2018 - 9:45am
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to... Continue reading →

Lotte Porges – The Story Behind the Photograph

May 8, 2018 - 9:05am
Between the years 1942–1945, three different staged films were created in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Ghetto. Only a few short shots or fragments of the original versions have been preserved.[1] The most famous of these became the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein... Continue reading →

Cooperation of Rescue Organisations in Vienna: An Eyewitness Report

April 17, 2018 - 10:56am
Introduction The following document is part of The Wiener Library’s collection entitled ‘Eyewitness reports regarding the November Pogrom’, consisting of 365 eyewitness testimonies collected in the days, weeks, and months following the November Pogrom of 1938, alternatively known as ‘Kristallnacht’... Continue reading →

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