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.

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.

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!"

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.