On 23 February we welcomed special guests to the Library for the launch of our latest exhibition, Holocaust Letters. Our speakers for the evening included the Director of the Library Dr Toby Simpson, our Director of Research Dr Christine Schmidt, and those who have generously donated their own family’s Holocaust-era letters and curated a panel of the exhibition.
Remarkable exhibition entitled ‘Holocaust Letters’ at the Wiener Holocaust Library demonstrates how “the history of the Shoah is still being written”.
Using The Wiener Holocaust Library’s unique archival material on correspondence to discuss the mechanics of communication between separated families during the Nazi era and the Holocaust, Dr Christine Schmidt (Deputy Director and Head of Research) and Dr Barbara Warnock (Senior Curator and Head of Education) will explore how stamps and stationary were vital for survival during the Nazi era and the Holocaust.
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.
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.
This lecture examines Jane Haining through a microhistory approach. Haining was a Scottish missionary who worked among Christian and Jewish girls in Budapest, with the intention of bringing Jews into the Christian church. The chief conversionary tactic was to lead a ‘Christian example’. Dr Alex Sessa completed his PhD in Holocaust Studies at the University of Southampton under the supervision of Professor Tony Kushner.
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.
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’.
Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to hold onto each other through letters. But wartime conditions applied. Letters were censored and could not be sent between countries at war with each other. How to keep in contact? And, once contact was established, what to say — and about what to remain silent? In her presentation, Prof Debórah Dwork will trace how letters became threads stitching loved ones into each other’s constantly changing daily lives.
