For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

EHRI

In each episode of For the Living and the Dead, a Holocaust researcher talks about an object, now often in a museum, that tells a very personal story about the Holocaust. The first season of the EHRI Podcast has six episodes and features a teddy bear, mica-flakes, a postcard, gramophone discs, a magazine cover and the typewriter. The unique stories come from all over Europe – the Holocaust being a continent-wide phenomenon – ranging from Belgium to Ukraine, from Romania to Italy.This podcast season of six episodes is released every other week, starting 29 September 2022. In 2023, another season will follow.Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/ Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).

  1. 12/12/2024

    Uncovering Hidden (Hi)stories

    The final episode of the third series of the EHRI podcast takes a step back to look at micro-archives in a more general sense. In keeping with our theme, however, we also focus on an object that teaches us more about the Holocaust. An object that represents both the richness of sources that can be found in micro-archives and the challenges that those working with them face.  Our object of focus is a black and white photograph, depicting a group of prisoners dressed in the distinctive striped uniforms of Nazi concentration camps and walking along a corridor of barbed wire fencing. In the photograph, there is a woman in the fourth row from the front, circled in yellow. The woman’s name is Suzana Schossberger (Šosberger), and the photograph was taken by a Soviet military officer when Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Her son Mirko Stefanović remembers that his mother kept the photograph on a bookshelf in the living room, unframed and turned around. Mirko recalls how he never spoke to his mother about her imprisonment in Auschwitz even though she never tried to hide her experience and wore her tattooed prisoner number visibly.  The photograph came to the attention of Dr. Dora Komnenović, our guest for this episode, following a call launched by the Jewish Community of Novi Sad in preparation for the workshop "Archival Basics: A Hands-On Workshop for Micro-Archives”. This workshop was one of the several EHRI workshops for micro-archives organized by the German Federal Archives and other EHRI partners.  Mirko answered the call almost immediately to contribute his mother’s remarkable photograph. He did this, as he explains in the testimony we hear in the episode, because of the responsibility he feels as part of the generation of survivors’ children to help preserve the memory of the Holocaust for the future. The photograph is important not only because of its subject matter, but because it represents the challenging first step towards building relationships with non-traditional archives. In the further exchanges Dora had with Mirko, she also found out about an oral testimony that Mirko's mother gave to Yad Vashem in the 1990s. Mirko explained that he only listened to his mother’s testimony after her death and that he was not comfortable sharing it. This highlights the complex and emotionally charged nature of collecting such archival material from individuals and the relatives of survivors.  Suzana Schossberger was born and lived in Novi Sad, Serbia. She was the co-owner of a knitwear factory when, in April 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz along with her infant son, Andrija Schossberger and her father, Mirko Erdeš. Andrija and Mirko were sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival and were murdered. Her husband, Tibor Schossberger, died of typhus as a prisoner of war. Suzanna was selected by Mengele as a subject for experimentation. She was kept for some months in the hospital and subjected to unimaginable horrors before she could escape to the wider barracks where she managed to remain until the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers in January 1945.  Dr. Dora Komnenovic is a research associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and an employee of the Federal Archives/Stasi Records Archive in Berlin. Podcast host is Katharina Freise. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    30 min

  2. 11/28/2024

    The Writings of a Wandering Poet

    In this podcast episode, we learn about a remarkable manuscript that survived the Holocaust and was later discovered to be the work of one of the most interesting modern creators of Hebrew literature in the 20th century: David Vogel. The manuscript is made up of pages upon pages of miniscule, uniform handwriting and was hidden by Vogel in the back garden of the boarding house in Hauteville, France where he was staying before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Vogel was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 52, but his writings and the story of his life live on to inspire, inform and commemorate the turbulent 1930s in Europe.    Vogel was born in Staniv in the Podolia region in 1891, then in the Russian empire and today in Ukraine. He moved to Vilnius, where he attended yeshiva, and then in 1912 to Vienna - the center of literature and culture during the Fin de siècle. At the beginning of the First World War Vogel was imprisoned in Vienna – and not for the last time in his short life - as he was considered a subject of an enemy country; Russia. He met and married Ada Nadler, with whom he had one daughter, Tamara. In 1925 they moved to Paris, the city of lights that beckoned him and the literary and artistic people of its time.   We are joined in this episode by Amir Ben-Amram, archivist at The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world, who will talk us through the fascinating journey behind this discovery. From the manuscript's burial in Hauteville, France, we follow its voyage across Europe and the sea to America, passing through the hands of Vogel's close friend, and painter, Avraham Goldberg, to Shimon Halkin, writer and poet and finally to Asher Barash, chairman of the Hebrew Writers' Association and founder of the Gnazim Archive, where it found its final resting place. The manuscript is now part of the collection of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association. Featured guests:  Amir Ben-Amram is an archivist at the Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.  Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    29 min

  3. 11/14/2024

    The Lost letter

    In this episode, a lost letter tells the extraordinary story of Tommy Benford Junior, a baby boy born in Paris in 1939 and saved by the incredible bravery of a Dutch woman called Truus Wijsmuller.  To look at, the letter is simple, and formally written, but it contains a father's desperate plea to save his son.    Tommy Benford Junior was born in Paris in 1939. His father was an accomplished American jazz drummer, and his mother, Sophia Mezzaro, was a dancer, singer and pianist from Vienna. Sophia died giving birth to their son in 1939, and Thomas Benford Senior was left unable to care for him and work to provide a living for them both. Poor economic conditions after the outbreak of war and the threat of fascism spreading across Europe meant that Tommy's father needed to return with his band to the US and couldn't take his son with him. Unwilling to leave Europe without knowing that his son was in safe hands, Tommy Benford Senior wrote to the American Consulate in Paris, which led to Tommy Junior being collected by Truus, who agreed to take 14-month year old Tommy Junior from Paris to Amsterdam, where she personally cared for him for 9 weeks.     Joining us to tell this story are Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Their documentary not only brings to light the incredible bravery of Truus Wijsmuller, who was leading the efforts of the "Kindertransport" that saved the  lives of more than 10,000 children during the Second World War, but also captures the moment that Tommy Benford Junior read the letter from his father to Mrs Wijsmuller, and learnt the truth about the efforts that went into saving his life.  In addition to speaking to Tommy Benford Junior, Sturhoofd and van Tijn were able to speak to 23 people who were saved as children by Truus Wijsmuller in the process of making their documentary. Since it’s completion, they’ve met a further 3.   Featured guests:  Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, are directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.  Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    34 min

  4. 10/31/2024

    A Place of Paradise

    In this episode, the object of our focus is a black and white photograph that offers a harrowing glimpse into the narrow survival of Nazi camp prisoners. Two of the survivors in this image would later travel to the ‘paradise’ of Windermere, in the Lake District in England, on 14 August 1945. The image contains a stark contrast; the jubilant gestures of greeting from the gaggle of young survivors sits in juxtaposition with the cargo train they are loaded onto, a vehicle normally used for transporting goods and chattel and speaks to the extraordinary nature of the story behind it.   The photo is remarkable, not least because it captured the precise moment of liberation on May 8th, 1945, for many of the young survivors - who were meant to be taken to Theresienstadt camp ghetto - but because the train contains two young Jewish survivors who later became known as part of "The Windermere Group".  The podcast focuses on Ike Alterman, one of the 300 young Jewish orphans who were selected to travel to Windermere for recuperation. Ike survived no less than four concentration camps and multiple death marches by the time he was sixteen, and it is because of him that this photograph, along with many others, has found its way into the safekeeping of The Lake District Holocaust Project. We hear from Ike’s testimony in this episode, and how this photograph was taken only minutes after the survivors found out that they had been freed.   Ike Alterman was born in 1928 in Ożarów, Poland to a large, Orthodox Jewish family. His upbringing was happy, but his life and that of his family was changed in the short matter of weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Ożarów was taken over by the Nazis and made into its own Ghetto which meant that whilst his family were not forcibly removed, the conditions of their lives changed drastically and for two years they lived in fear, poverty and persecution. After two years, the horrible moment came in which Ike’s family were separated; his mother, brother and sisters were sent to Treblinka, never to be heard of again. Ike and his father were taken to Blyzin as slave labourers, but were later separated too. Aged only thirteen or fourteen, Ike was alone in a horrific system of violence.   Ike was transported from Blyzin to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then from there to Buchenwald by way of a death march, finally arriving in Theresienstadt in 1945. Through Ike’s powerful testimony, we hear the atrocities of life in these camps. What makes his testimony unique, as is discussed in this episode, is that Ike’s work at Auschwitz-Birkenau put him in the unusual position of entering the crematoriums used as part of the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ to collect clothes, making Ike one of the last living survivors who actually witnessed such crematoriums in operation and the atrocities they concealed. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    35 min

  5. 10/17/2024

    The Stamp of Samuilo Demajo

    In this episode, we focus on a stamp, printed on the inside jacket of a book donated to the National Library of Serbia in 1941.  The stamp is remarkable not least because it belonged to a prominent Belgrade lawyer named Samuilo Demajo, whose family was murdered in May 1942 in a Dušegupka, a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas van. Though Demajo's life was abruptly ended, his legacy lives on in this and the approximately 200 other books that he donated in an effort to rebuild the public library.   Demajo was born in 1898 into a prominent Belgrade Jewish family, doing his Military Service after the First World War before studying law and becoming a lawyer. As an active member of his community, he was involved in social initiatives and local politics as well as a member of the Belgrade City Assembly.  After the National Library of Serbia was bombed by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe and its precious collections destroyed by fire between 6 - 9 April 1941, a public call was put out for donations to rebuild the library's collection. 6th April 1941 also marked the beginning of World War II in former Yugoslavia and the control of Belgrade as well as other parts of German-occupied Serbia by the "Militärbefehlshaber Serbien" (territory of the military commander in Serbia). Persecution of Serbian Jews began immediately, with strict laws and restrictions against their movement, rights, employment and citizenship. Nevertheless, in May 1941, Samuilo Demajo responded to the public call of the library and made the generous offer of a donation of 133 "works from all fields of science and literature". Due to the restrictive laws against Jews, it was prohibited for Demajo’s donation to be accepted, but the then-director of the National Library corresponded with the German authorities and an exception was made.  Demajo later added around 60 bound volumes of newspapers and magazines, stenographic notes from the National Assembly, and collections of laws and decrees.   The stamp was found by Andreas Roth, who was doing research in the National Library of Serbia in 2014.  The discovery led to Andreas conducting a research project with a teacher colleague and a handful of history students, to try to uncover the story behind the stamp and retrace the lost history of the Demajo family.  Through their research, the group were able to identify the history of the family and uncover details about their lives in Serbia before the war, after the occupation and ultimately leading to their tragic murders in May 1942.   Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    34 min

  6. 10/03/2024

    A Message from Malawi

    ​The object of our attention in this episode is a well-travelled letter of 21 pages, received in 1997 by Professor Albert Lichtblau, in response for an appeal for "unpublished biographical memoirs" of Holocaust survivors he had posted on behalf of the Institute for Jewish History of Austria as well as the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The letter was written by Norbert Abeles, an Austrian living in Malawi, and its arrival prompted an exchange of further letters between Malawi and Austria, unravelling in the process the remarkable story of a young Jewish boy's escape from Nazi persecution and his journey across three different continents to find home.    Abeles was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923 to Siegfried Abeles, an author of Jewish children's books, and Sabine Abeles. Abeles's life was already marred with hardship even before the Nazi occupation of Austria, having experienced the traumatic suicide of his father in 1937, when his mother signed him up for the Kindertransport, an evacuation program for Jewish children in Nazi-controlled countries that took them to the United Kingdom. By the time he said goodbye to her on the platform in December 1938, he already knew it would be the last they ever saw of each other. Indeed, Sabine Abeles was deported to Maly Trostinec on the 6th of May 1942 and was murdered days later on the 11th.   Once in the United Kingdom, Abeles attended Hakhshara, an agricultural school intended to prepare young Jewish people for emigration to Palestine. This school was located in Stenton, East Lothian in Scotland at Whittingehame House, the former home of the Earl of Balfour. The house and the grounds were leased to The Whittingehame Farm School Ltd., a non-profit organisation which aimed to educate and train Jewish children in the range of agricultural skills. Students were instructed in agriculture and horticulture in a combination of English and Hebrew, and days were structured around a half work, half study routine.   Before the end of his time at Whittingehame, Norbert was one of a handful of refugees who were interned as “enemy aliens”. This, along with the trauma of being torn away from their parents and the vastly different backgrounds and beliefs of the children staying at Whittingehame made for turbulent years at the school, which according to Norbert was very much in a “disorganized state”.   After leaving Whittingehame in 1941, Abeles found work as a lock smith's apprentice whilst attending evening school for a Diploma of the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, which sparked the beginning of a professional career that would take him around the world.   He married his first wife in 1950, who had also emigrated to the UK from Austria. Together, they left the UK and emigrated to Africa in 1956, living in Nigeria. Norbert would go on to live in different places across Africa, taking various postings in the British Colonial Service, predominantly in the educational department and taking posts as a lecturer.   ​Featured guest: In this episode, we are joined by Albert Lichtblau, former Deputy Director of the Center of Jewish Culture History and the History Department, at the University of Salzburg in Austria.  Podcast host is Katharina Freise. Music accredi Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    34 min

  7. 12/14/2023

    Gita's Notes for Survival

    In this podcast episode, released during Hanukka 2023, we talk with Ofer Lifshitz about a tiny memory booklet, as small as a young girl’s fist, that belonged to a teenage girl named Gita Rubanenko.  Gita was born in 1929 and lived with her parents and sister in a town called Kovno in Lithuania. Kovno, also known as Kaunas, was before the war the capital and largest city of Lithuania. In 1939, Kovno had a vibrant Jewish community with approximately 32,000 people, about one-fourth of the city’s population. In June 1940, Kovno's everyday life was horribly disrupted when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. When Nazi Germany took over a year later, and Gita was twelve years old, life for the Jewish community became impossible. Many were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and Kovno Ghetto was established to hold the Lithuanian Jews. During the summer of 1941, German occupation officials concentrated the remaining Jews, some 35,000 people, in a ghetto, an area of small, primitive houses and no running water. Kovno ghetto was officially sealed on August 15, 1941. Gita and her family were trapped inside. Life in the ghetto was harsh and during several ‘Aktions’ thousands were again murdered. Still, those surviving, like Gita, tried to maintain a form of daily life and human dignity. In July 1944, the ghetto was evacuated and most of the remaining Jews were deported. Gita’s family was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Conditions in the camp were brutal. Gita’s parents and sister were murdered. Gita survived. And with her her ‘knizhicka’. In this small booklet, Gita recorded what she witnessed throughout the war. Not with elaborate words, but more like dry facts. After the war, Gita returned to Kovno and later emigrated to Israel, where she married and had children. She kept the knizhicka with her until her death in 2020. Her daughter, Hasia Mandel, gave it to Yad Vashem for safekeeping after her mother had passed away. Uniquely, Hasia and her two children Elhanan and Sharon (Gita’s grandchildren) can be heard in this podcast episode, reciting from the knizhicka.  Featured guests: Ofer Lifshitz was until recently content producer and editor for the Gathering the Fragments Project of Yad Vashem, the World Holcoaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Ofer now works at Tel Aviv University. Podcast host is Katharina Freise. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    29 min

  8. 11/30/2023

    A Paper Heart for Wanda

    In this podcast episode, the object of our attention is a delicate paper heart, a small work of art, crafted by Elisabeth Salomon. You can enfold the 'heart', like a flower, and on each petal, you will find the name of the woman or girl (sometimes a boy or man) who made it, maybe a date or place, and endearing messages of gratitude. Elizábeth was not the only woman who crafted this paper heart. There are many paper "hearts", all with their own uniqueness, in the Swedish Holocaust Museum, that was opened in the summer of 2023. Many carry a message on one of the petals that is more or less similar to the one by Elizábeth: "Andi erinnerung liebe Vrou Wanda", not so good German for "of/for the memory of dear Mrs Wanda".  Elizábeth, called Bössi by family, Salomon, was Romanian and Jewish. We don't know much about her life until she was one of the prisoners of Bergen Belsen when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945. Like all prisoners in the camp, she was in a horrible condition, close to death.   Inthe summer of 1945, Sweden agreed to allow 10,000 ex-inmates of Belsen, Buchenwald and other German concentration camps to travel to Sweden and stay there for a period of six months recuperation. Elisabeth and a relative, possibly cousin, Laura, who also survived the camp, were brought on one of the so called White Boats to Sweden where they recovered in a hospital. It was here that they met Wanda Lanzer, an Austrian-Jewish woman who had sought and found refuge in neutral Sweden and was now involved in helping the survivors of the camps. Like many others, Elisabeth felt very grateful to Wanda and developed a special bond with her. She wrote to her also after her release from hospital and Wanda helped her with books and housing. After a while though, Elisabeth returned to Romania. We don’t know anything about her from then on. The paper hearts are now part of the collection of the recently opened Swedish Holocaust Museum in Stockholm. Featured guests: Yael Fried is curator at the Sveriges Museum om Förintelsen, the Swedish Holocaust Museum. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

    24 min
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In each episode of For the Living and the Dead, a Holocaust researcher talks about an object, now often in a museum, that tells a very personal story about the Holocaust. The first season of the EHRI Podcast has six episodes and features a teddy bear, mica-flakes, a postcard, gramophone discs, a magazine cover and the typewriter. The unique stories come from all over Europe – the Holocaust being a continent-wide phenomenon – ranging from Belgium to Ukraine, from Romania to Italy.This podcast season of six episodes is released every other week, starting 29 September 2022. In 2023, another season will follow.Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/ Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).

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