Release date: 5 October 2023 | More about the Podcast Series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

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.

International Conference | New documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relations: A Dialogue Between Historians and Theologians

Monday-Wednesday, October 9-11, 2023  | Aula Magna of the Pontifical Gregorian University Piazza della Pilotta 4, Rome, Italy

Registration is now open for the international conference New Documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII and their Meaning for Jewish-Christian Relation: A Dialogue between Historians and Theologians. After its first announcement, last June, the conference aroused already widespread interest. Indeed, it aims to offer new light on the historical and theological controversies concerning Pope Pius XII and the Vatican during the Holocaust period, and on Jewish-Christian relations at multiple levels, thanks to important discoveries emerging from the analysis of the Vatican archives and to a strengthened collaboration between institutions and researchers.

Last cut-off date for applying this year: 22 October 2023.

By facilitating international access to an unprecedented range of key archives and collections related to the Holocaust as well as access to archival and digital humanities expertise, the EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowships support and stimulate Holocaust research conducted by researchers, archivists, librarians, curators, and junior scholars, especially PhD candidates with limited resources.

The Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (partner in EHRI) will be offering grants for research stays at the Center in Munich during 2024.

Reading Documents Beyond, Between and Within the Lines

By Dora Komnenovic, Bundesarchiv

From September 10-15, 2023, the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) hosted the five-day EHRI archival seminar "Modern Diplomatics of the Holocaust" at its branch in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Following a competitive call for applications, twelve participants from Europe, Israel and the United States were invited to participate in the event, which was organised for the second time since 2016. 

Over the five days of the programme, the attendees were introduced to the German administrative tradition and critical document analysis, i.e. diplomatics as an auxiliary science of history. What might seem as a rather "dry" topic at first glance has nevertheless managed to impress, as one of the participants remarked:

 "It's been a while since I had a week such as this one at the EHRI archival seminar. It opened a whole new world to me!"

The new EHRI Document Blogpost “Wartime Paperwork: How Citizens Navigated Soviet Bureaucracy During and After World War II”, written by Tobias Wals, shows how Jewish Soviet citizens used flaws and loopholes in postwar bureaucracy to negotiate their position in society and even managed to sometimes change their identities.

From August 7th to 11th, the Jewish Museum in Prague in partnership with the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, organized the first international EHRI Seminar tailored to educators teaching the Holocaust in educational institutions like schools, museums, and memorial sites.

The Gathering the Voices Association launches the serious and educational computer game Marion’s Journey on Wednesday 30th August, 4:00 PM CET on Zoom. The educational online experience follows the flight of Marion Camrass during the Second World War from occupied Poland, through Siberia, then Bukhara and finally to Glasgow, where she settled, married and raised her family.

On 13 July 2023, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science submitted to the European Union the step 1 application for EHRI, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, to establish itself as an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).

As EHRI prepares to become a permanent research infrastructure, it is increasing its outreach towards user groups that have so far had less engagement with EHRI, but where the EHRI consortium sees potential value. As such, EHRI has organised two initiatives in 2023 to work more closely with Holocaust Educators.