See what’s coming up at the library, or you may be interested in past events.
The Wiener Library, in association with the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, is delighted to invite you to the launch of Music and Exile: From 1933 to the Present Day, Yearbook 22 of the RCGAES (Brill 2023).
This talk focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.
This year's Annual Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture will take place once again at Gresham College, and will be delivered by esteemed historian Professor Sir Richard Evans.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is looking for people to bring their stories and artefacts relating to the Second World War, the Nazi era and/or the Holocaust to a ‘Digital Collection Day’ on Friday 10 November (10am - 3pm). The event is part of a nationwide campaign organised by Their Finest Hour, a team based at the University of Oxford and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which is collecting and preserving the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War.
Aimed at GCSE and A-Level students, this talk will utilise sources from the Library’s unique archive to gain an understanding of the history of Polenaktion; to explore the November Pogrom from the perspective of eyewitnesses; to consider why the events were so significant; and to reflect on them 85 years on.
Jews had long been active in the clothing trade in Europe, developing new production and retail methods and excelling as designers. However, in the UK clothes production was mostly conservative and design was not a concept. What happened to these Jews in the clothing industry after the Nazis came to power in 1933, bent on ridding Germany of Jews? Many found asylum in Britain, where soon the refugee owners of Kangol and other firms were employing thousands of British workers at a time of dreadfully high unemployment.
The Ładoś operation was one of the largest rescue missions of the Holocaust, and The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time. The author, Roger Moorhouse, will give a short talk about this remarkable book which follows the desperate bids of Jews to obtain life-saving documents, and their painful uncertainty over whether they will be able to escape the murderous machinery of the Holocaust.
Join us for the launch of our exhibition, Expelled! The History of the “Polenaktion”, which marks the 85th anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Poland.
This exhibition, on show for the first time in English, is being staged to mark the 85th anniversary of this often-overlooked event; the first mass deportation of Jews from Germany to Poland. It chronicles the lives of families from all over Germany, who fell victim to this deportation. The launch will be held at The Wiener […]
Join The Wiener Holocaust Library and Jewish Renaissance to mark the publication of Thomas Harding’s The Maverick - the story of the famed publisher George Weidenfeld, who transformed not only publishing but the culture of ideas, from his struggles as an Austrian-Jewish refugee in London to his rise as a world-renowned literary figure.
Black people experienced persecution and discrimination before, during and after the Third Reich in Germany and elsewhere. This workshop will utilise the Library’s collections to crucially explore how the persecution of the black community by the Nazi regime was not straightforward and followed a different timeline to the persecution of other groups.
In this talk, Dr Laurien Vastenhout presents an explanatory framework for this so-called ‘Dutch paradox’. In doing so, she not only provides an insight into how the Holocaust unfolded in the Netherlands, but also address some persistent misconceptions about the role of the Jewish community leadership – specifically, the Dutch Jewish Council – in the process of isolation and deportation of the Jews during the German occupation.
