See what’s coming up at the library, or you may be interested in past events.
To mark the end of the One Story Many Voices tour, the Wiener Holocaust Library is hosting a panel discussion on Thursday 30th March 2023, called Reverberations and Traces: Using Sound from Letters and Archive Sources.
Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.
This talk examines a Jewish nurse’s letter to her brother from the opening months of the First World War. The letter is replete with allusions to the unfolding military situation on the Eastern Front, but it also offers a glimpse into her own journey of self-discovery – a newly trained nurse, a woman who has realised that she ‘likes working’.
When Deborah Jaffé was clearing her parents’ flat she found a pile of damp and mouldy letters and papers. The 200 letters were written in German by her father in Berlin and dated between 1937-39. Many were carbon copies of letters he had typed on the typewriter he had given her. Despite her almost non-existent German, she realised they were important and a young man’s attempts to get out. This has now gone from being a pile of 200 letters to an archive with its own biography.
