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‘I am sitting on a dead branch’: Dr Hedwig Leibetseder’s letters from Lichtenburg

In 1936, Dr Hedwig Leibetseder (née Abranowicz 1900-1989) jumped from the rear window on the 5th floor of no. 14 Düsseldorfer Strasse in Berlin.  She had just travelled to Prague to retrieve a microphotography copy of the indictment of the first trial against Neu Beginnen, the anti-Nazi resistance group to which she belonged, but the Gestapo were lying in wait to seize the document upon her return. 

Virtual Exhibition Panel: Jewish Archives, Artefacts and Memory in Transit

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.

Hybrid Lunchtime Exhibition Talk: Red Cross Messages from Nazi Germany, with Anthony Grenville

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.

Hybrid Event: The Last Letter, with Karen Baum Gordon

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. 

Holocaust family memoirs – Yes, another one!

Sandra Lipner is a techne (AHRC)-funded PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. In her doctoral thesis, she uses a cultural family history approach to investigate German bourgeois subjectivities within the context of the Third Reich. This blogpost asks what unites these family histories, what sets them apart, and why they matter.

Heritage Fund The Association of Jewish Refugees Federal Foreign Office
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