For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

Dec 12 2024 19 ep. 29 mins 5

For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust Podcast artwork

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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Uncovering Hidden (Hi)stories

Dec 12 2024 29 mins

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 obj

The Writings of a Wandering Poet

Nov 28 2024 29 mins

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 Ha

The Lost letter

Nov 14 2024 33 mins

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 a

A Place of Paradise

Oct 31 2024 34 mins

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

The Stamp of Samuilo Demajo

Oct 17 2024 34 mins

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 l

A Message from Malawi

Oct 03 2024 34 mins

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,

Gita's Notes for Survival

Dec 14 2023 28 mins

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 Lithuan

A Paper Heart for Wanda

Nov 30 2023 24 mins

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 thi

A Desperate Call from the Cold Crematorium

Nov 16 2023 23 mins

In this podcast episode, we talk about a letter dated 23 April 1945, from a man called Hans Fröhlicher to the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. Hans Frölicher was the Swiss ambassador to Germany during World War II. The neatly typed, official letter starts: ”I have the honour to enclose a copy of a communication that was secretly delivered to the Consulate General in Munich/Ro

A Tefillin Tale from Siberia

Nov 02 2023 31 mins

In this episode, Katharina Freise talks with Lidia Zessin-Jurek about some very special tefillin, which is the name given to two black leather boxes with straps which are put on by adult Jews for weekday morning prayers, and are worn on the forehead and upper arm.During her research into Polish Jewish refugees in the USSR, Lidia came across the story of the Polaniecki family, mothe