To mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Library’s predecessor organisation in Amsterdam, the Library is staging two exciting new exhibitions.

The Wiener Library at 90: Highlights From the Archives

This exhibition commemorates the anniversary of the founding of world’s longest continually existing archive on the Nazi era and the Holocaust. It showcases the breadth and depth of the Library’s collections, encompassing unique items recording pre-Nazi era life; the struggle against Nazism; efforts to document and record antisemitic and anti-Roma persecution and the Holocaust; Nazi documents giving evidence of their crimes; material relating to the lives of Jewish refugees, and efforts to document other genocides.

The exhibition demonstrates the range and the importance, and sometimes fragility, of the Library’s collections.

The Wiener Library at 90: The Wiener Family Story

Ruth, Eva and Mirjam Wiener, survivors of Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

This exhibition traces the history of the family of the founder of the Library’s founder, Dr Alfred Wiener.

Born in Potsdam in 1885, Wiener was a noted anti-Nazi campaigner by the time of the Nazi accession to power in 1933. In the same year he relocated to Amsterdam for his own safety and founded the Library’s predecessor organisation, the Jewish Central Information Office.

This exhibition will examine Wiener’s life of anti-Nazi work and also explore the fates of Wiener’s wife and daughters who became trapped in German-occupied Holland, and were eventually arrested and held in camps, including Bergen-Belsen. Towards the end of the war, they were released in a rare prisoner exchange. Wiener’s daughter Mirjam later went on to move to London and marry Ludwik Finkelstein, who had his own story of incarceration and escape during the war. 

Exhibition Events