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After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to Blanka Rothschild's story.
After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to Norman Salsitz's story.
After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to Aron and Lisa Derman's story.
After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to Thomas Buergenthal's story.
After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to Regina Gelb's story.
After WWII and the fall of the Nazi regime, Holocaust survivors faced the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. Listen to six survivors tell their stories.
Excerpts from Elie Wiesel's addresses during US Holocaust Memorial Museum Days of Remembrance commemorations in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
Survivor Elie Wiesel devoted his life to educating the world about the Holocaust. Learn about key events in the world and his life from 1928–1951.
Survivor Elie Wiesel devoted his life to educating the world about the Holocaust. Explore key events in the world and his life from 1952 until his death in 2016.
In 1978, the President's Commission on the Holocaust was charged with submitting a report on the creation of a Holocaust memorial in the US. Read excerpts.
Transcript of 2004 remarks delivered by Elie Wiesel, at a convening of the Darfur Emergency Summit, calling attention to atrocities in Sudan.
The SA established a protective custody camp at Hainewalde in March 1933. Well-known journalist and writer Axel Eggebrecht was among its early prisoners.
Millions of people suffered and died in camps, ghettos, and other sites during the Holocaust....
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center The Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943 is often viewed as the classic example of Jewish armed resistance to Nazi oppression during the Holocaust. Indeed, most studies of Jewish resistance have focused on events in the larger ghettos such as Warsaw, Bialystok, Grodno, or Minsk. However, Jews engaged in some form of resistance in many of the ghettos the Germans established. Jews generally took the option of armed resistance as the last resort, and only after the…
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jews fought in partisan groups based in the forests of eastern Europe. In Poland, Jews were generally excluded from partisan groups because of antisemitic and anti-Communist attitudes. While Soviet partisan units were sometimes receptive to Jewish fighters, the formation of a stronger Soviet and Polish resistance in 1943 was too late for the vast majority of Jews in eastern Europe killed in mass shootings and gassings. The Jewish…
Despite great obstacles, Jews throughout occupied Europe attempted armed resistance against th...
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center Introduction In many cities immediately before World War II (Kalisz, for instance), Zionist groups occupied at best a secondary status behind other Jewish political organizations with different orientations and aims, such as the socialist Bundist party or the traditionalist Agudath Israel party, which represented Poland’s sizable Orthodox Jewish population. During the war, however, members of Zionist youth movements embraced leadership positions in ghetto resistance…
Read an excerpt from Izak Lichtenstein’s 1947 testimony about the resistance movement in the Lachva (Lachwa) ghetto.
Difficult debates took place within ghettos about whether and how to resist under the most adverse conditions. Read a rare account from the Lokacze ghetto.
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center Summary extract from the testimony of Eliezer Breslin given to detectives from New Scotland Yard in Israel on May 22, 1995, during the investigation into Semion Serafinowicz, the former chief of the Belorussian police in Mir. The first ghetto was established three weeks after the German invasion and consisted only of a few streets, Zavalne Street and Visoka Street. It was not exactly a ghetto; it wasn't enclosed by a barbed wire fence. In this area the houses were…
General Terms Agudat Israel (In Yiddish, Agudas Yisroel) Political party founded in Kattowitz in Poland in 1912 to represent Orthodox Jews. Although the founding conference of the primary political part of Orthodox Jewry took place in May of 1912, the serious organization of Agudat Israel in Poland began in 1916. It was internal Jewish developments, rather than external factors, which spurred the anti-Zionist Orthodox to organize politically for the first time. Agudat Israel represented Jews who wished…
Read firsthand testimony about the occupation of Mlynów, the establishment of the...
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center Yizkor (memorial) books document the history of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Most often privately published and compiled through the collective efforts of former community residents, they describe daily life through essays and photographs and memorialize murdered residents. Most are in Hebrew and/or Yiddish. The following is a translation from the memorial book for Zhetel (Zdziecioł) describing resistance in Zhetel during the Holocaust. The…
Explore a timeline of key events related to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times.
Benjamin Meed, member of the resistance in Warsaw and later a leader of the survivor community, was a founder of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Explore a timeline of key events during the history of the Treblinka killing center in German-occupied Poland.
Explore a timeline of key events in the history of the Auschwitz camp complex in German-occupied Poland.
Establishment of the Camp The Germans established the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the town of Natzweiler, about 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg, the capital of the province of Alsace (in eastern France). It was one of the smaller concentration camps built by the Germans. Until construction was completed in May 1941, prisoners slept in the nearby former Hotel Struthof, hence the name Natzweiler-Struthof. The camp held about 1,500 prisoners. Prisoners worked in nearby granite quarries, in…
Background This is the extraordinary story of more than 2,000 Polish Jewish refugees. Enduring the hardships of travel and restrictive immigration laws, they escaped wartime Europe to safety in the Far East just months before the start of the Nazi genocide that claimed the lives of three million Polish Jews. Their experiences were portrayed in an exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2000. Learn more about their stories. War and Occupation …whatever it was, was no more…
Recommended resources, topics, context, rationale, and critical thinking questions if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust.
The Hadamar Trial of October 1945 was the first mass atrocity trial held in the US occupation zone of Germany following World War II.
At the Nuremberg trials, Allied prosecutors submitted documentation left by the Nazi state itself. This evidence is a lasting refutation of attempts to deny the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Holocaust is a form of antisemitism. Holocaust deniers ignore the overwhelming evidence of the event and insist that the Holocaust is a myth, invented by the Allies, the Soviet communists, and the Jews for their own ends. According to the deniers' “logic” the Allies needed the “Holocaust myth” to justify their occupation of Germany in 1945 and the “harsh” persecution of Nazi defendants. Holocaust deniers also claim that Jews…
Nazi policy did a great deal to facilitate denial of the Holocaust even as the killing operation unfolded across German-occupied Europe during World War II. The Holocaust was a state secret in Nazi Germany. The Germans wrote down as little as possible. Most of the killing orders were verbal, particularly at the highest levels. Hitler's order to kill Jews was issued only on a need-to-know basis. The Nazi leaders generally avoided detailed planning of killing operations, preferring to proceed in a…
A Project of the Miles Lerman Center Samuel Gruber (ne Munyo Gruber) was born in 1913, in Podhajce, Poland (Pidhaitsi, Ukraine). As a youth, Samuel belonged to the Zionist organizations Ha-Shomer ha-Tza'ir and He-halutz. When he was 14, Samuel went to Lvov, Poland (Lviv, Ukraine) to attend high school. After graduation, Samuel remained in Lvov for about two years. He then returned to Podhajce where he worked as a bookkeeper for a company that manufactured farm equipment and bicycles. Though very few…
The outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry known as the Farhud (Farhud is an Arabic term best translated as “pogrom” or “violent dispossession”) erupted on June 1, 1941. It was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq. In the 1940s about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq (nearly 3 percent of the total population), with about 90,000 in Baghdad, 10,000 in Basra, and the remainder scattered throughout many small towns and villages. Jewish communities had existed in this region since the…
The Jewish children of Lodz suffered harsh conditions after the German invasion of Poland. Read excerpts from diaries where they recorded their experiences.
Diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Read excerpts from the diary of an anonymous child in the Lodz ghetto.
Young people's diaries capture some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Irena Aronowicz.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Rut Berlinska.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking events of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Chaim Benzion Cale.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Karolina Dresler.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Miriam Goldberg.
Children's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Chaim Kozienicki.
Young people's diaries bear witness to some of the most heartbreaking experiences of the Holocaust. Learn about the diary and experiences of Jakub Lapides.
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