In this hands-on lunchtime talk, Jenifer Bell will demonstrate how she translated a German letter on display in the exhibition. She will discuss how she approaches linguistic and cultural questions in personal papers and researches references to contemporary social life to create richly contextualised texts.

Join the curators of the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership’s latest exhibition, Holocaust Letters, to learn more about how they developed the exhibition. Their talk will discuss key letters on display, the ethics and practice of curating personal document collections, the role of the archive in mediating the past, and reflections on co-curating with historians and families.

With the soon-to-launched virtual Holocaust Letters exhibition as a starting point, this virtual panel will explore new ways and research into thinking about archives, artifacts and other primary sources, including material sources as well as those not held in traditional archives to help us gain deeper insight into the history of Jewish refugees in transit and the knowledge those migrants possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost.

Red Cross messages had been introduced during the First World War, when an urgent need developed for a means that would re-establish the communications that had been severed by the conflict, for example between prisoners of war and their families at home. During the Second World War, as conventional means of communication were increasingly denied to Jews trapped in the Third Reich, Red Cross messages came to play a vital part in what remained of the contacts between those Jews and their family members who had escaped abroad; little systematic attention has, however, as yet been devoted to them.