Highlights from the Archives
XXX
In 1933 in Amsterdam, German-Jewish exile Alfred Wiener established The Wiener Holocaust Library’s predecessor organisation, the Jewish Central Information Office. It monitored Nazi Germany and gathered intelligence about the position of the Jewish community there. In 1939, the organisation was relocated to London. This exhibition showcases the breadth and depth of our unique collections, gathered by Alfred Wiener and others since 1933.
“The Wiener Library is Britain’s most powerful tool for teaching people about the Nazi era and the challenges – political, personal and cultural – that the catastrophe of the Holocaust poses for us all”
Sir Simon Schama
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Alfred Wiener, Vor Pogromen (‘Prelude to Pogroms’, or ‘Before Pogroms’), 1919
This pamphlet, published in Germany shortly after the First World War, reveals the concerns that Alfred Wiener had about the activities of antisemitic groups in Germany at this time. This was Wiener’s first publication, written shortly after he had been demobilised from the German army.
In the aftermath of the First World War, antisemitic myths, such as the idea that Germany’s Jews had betrayed their country and sought its defeat, were propagated in nationalist militaristic circles, and they gained some traction amongst the wider German public. In this pamphlet, Wiener analysed antisemitic groups, their sources and funding and connections, and warned that antisemitism in Germany might eventually result in violent attacks on Jews in Germany.
Poster produced by the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Association of Jewish Soldiers), 1920
This poster is an early item collected by the Library’s predecessor organisations which highlights the struggle against antisemitism in Germany.
This organisation of Jewish war veterans was founded in 1919 in Germany to counter accusations that Jews were unpatriotic or had not contributed to the German war effort.
In the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, German nationalist groups such as the Der Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German Association) flourished. They promoted the idea that Jews weren’t true Germans, and promulgated antisemitic myths that claimed that Jews had shirked their duty or had even caused the defeat of Germany.
The top section of the text of this poster reads: ‘To the German Mother! 12,000 Jewish soldiers fell for the Fatherland in the field of honour: Christian and Jewish heroes fought together and rest together in foreign soil’.
Anti-Nazis
By the time he fled to Holland, Alfred Wiener already had an extensive track record of campaigning against antisemitism and Nazism in Germany.
Der Anti-Nazi: Redner und Pressematerial über die N.S.D.A.P, (The Anti-Nazi: Speeches and Press Material about the N.S.D.A.P, National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazi Party), Berlin, edition 1932
From the 1920s, Wiener and a number of others, such as Hans Reichmann and Walter Gyssling, worked at the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith and other organisations to gather intelligence on antisemitic groups and specifically, the Nazi movement. They produced counter-propaganda materials, fact sheets to challenge antisemitic lies, launched legal cases and spoke out against antisemitism at public meetings. Wiener continued this work in Amsterdam in the 1930s.
Since this time, the Library has collected material documenting the struggle against the Nazis.
This collection of documents was distributed by staff at Büro Wilhelmstrasse, a small semi-clandestine organisation established in Berlin in 1928 to gather evidence about Nazi Party activities and produce material to analyse and counter antisemitic arguments and the ideas and policies of the Nazis. Der Anti-Nazi focussed on providing information about and critiquing Nazi politicians and policies.
The first edition of Der Anti-Nazi had a print run of 180,000 copies and was just over 30 pages long. By the time that this version was printed in 1932, the volume ran to 180 pages.
A tomato seed packet, containing a concealed anti-Nazi pamphlet, c.1939
The pamphlet contained within this packet of tomato seeds was written by the exiled German Communist writer Gustav Regler (1898–1963). In it, Regler denounced the Nazi Party’s attacks on intellectuals in the Third Reich.
It is part of an extensive and varied collection of anti-Nazi writing held by the Library and known as Tarnschriften – ‘hidden writings’. Approximately 1000 covert and concealed publications were produced by a variety of anti-Nazi groups between 1933 and 1945 as a form of political resistance to Nazi rule.
The Perpetrators
From the start of their anti-Nazi work in the 1920s, Alfred Wiener and his colleagues focussed upon collecting and analysing Nazi documents and publications. The Library’s collections document the growing radicalisation of Nazi policies in Germany in the 1930s, and include Nazi records of genocide perpetrated during the Second World War.
Gerda Nabe’s schoolwork, Germany, c.1935–1936
The text reads: ‘Explanation of the Reich Citizenship Law. Whoever is descended from three fully Jewish grandparents is a Jew. Whoever has two fully Jewish grandparents is a mixed Jew (“Jüdischer Mischling”). He who is a member of a Jewish religious community or is married to a Jew is a Jew.’
This diagram forms part of project work produced by German schoolgirl Gerda Nabe in the mid-1930s. It represents aspects of the Nuremberg Laws, introduced by the Nazis in 1935.
The Nuremberg Laws codified who was categorised as a Jew, and Nabe’s diagram shows an aspect of this. Jews are represented on the diagram with the blue diagonal stripes.
Ernst Hiemer (text) and Philipp Rupprecht (‘Fips’) (illustrations), Der Giftpilz, (‘The Poisonous Mushroom’), Nuremberg, 1938
This children’s book, published during the Nazi era in Germany, features some of the best-known antisemitic propaganda images targeted at children. The Poisonous Mushroom was published by Julius Streicher (1885-1946), a publisher and a regional leader in Germany during the Nazi era. Streicher was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic pro-Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer (‘The Stormer’ or ‘Stormtrooper’).
The book was not an official Nazi Party production, but Streicher had up to 100,000 copies of it published and distributed, particularly to German schools. The book describes how children might identify and protect themselves from Jews. It is one of a number of similar publications produced by Streicher, Hiemer, who was a former teacher, and the illustrator ‘Fips’.
Julius Streicher was convicted and executed for crimes against humanity in 1946 at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.
A ballot paper from the Reichstag election, Germany, 1936
This ballot paper for the 29 March 1936 Reichstag (parliamentary) election may have been sent to the JCIO from one of its contacts in Germany: it forms part of a collection of documents held by The Wiener Holocaust Library whose provenance is unclear.
The ballot paper is for the constituency of Hessen-Nassau in western Germany. Voters only had one option: to vote for the list of candidates of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), headed by Adolf Hitler. The slogan at the top of the ballot reads: ‘Reichstag for Freedom and Peace’
Juden Raus! (Jews Out!) boardgame, 1938
This game was produced privately by Günther and Company in Dresden and distributed by the games company Fabricus. It features crude antisemitic imagery, and the aim of the game is to remove Jews outside of the city walls, where a slogan reads Auf nach Palästina! (Off to Palestine!).
Although the game was not produced or endorsed by the Nazi Party and does not feature any Nazi insignia, its name mirrors a
Nazi slogan, and its themes reflect antisemitic Nazi policies of forced deportations of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property.
The game was produced in a context of deteriorating conditions for Jews in Germany. The Nazi policy of ‘Aryanisation’ (seizure) of property intensified during 1938, and many Jewish families lost their homes and businesses, and other items of value. The Library has three copies of Juden Raus! at least one of which has been in the collection since the 1940s.
German soldiers filming the pogrom of Lviv, 1941
This photograph shows German Army (Wehrmacht) soldiers in a propaganda unit filming a massacre of Jews carried out by the Ukrainian National Militia as part of the Lviv pogroms of June–July 1941. Other pogroms in Lviv at this time were perpetrated by Einsatzgruppe C. The image was probably taken on 30 June 1941, the day the Germans occupied the city and the pogroms began.
Lviv was occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939, and then by Germany from June 1941. Approximately 6,000 Jews died in the violence. This photograph was taken by a member of the Wehrmacht, and it shows his comrades photographing a pogrom. This photograph is part of a set donated anonymously to the Library. The violence depicted in the photographs is extreme.
‘Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A’, part of the Stahlecker Report, 15 October 1941
This map was part of a secret Nazi report detailing the mass murder of Jews carried out by the SS Einsatzgruppe A. The Einsatzgruppen (Task Forces) were SS death squads who followed the German Army after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, orchestrating and committing mass murders of the Nazis’ ‘racial’ and ideological enemies: Jews, Roma and Communists. Some of the murders that occurred in Soviet territories were perpetrated not by the SS but by local collaborators and local militia groups.
The map indicates the number of Jews murdered by Einsatzgruppe A in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus: numbers are recorded beside coffins for each territory.
The Wiener Library assisted the Nuremberg Trials in their work, and afterwards, The Wiener Holocaust Library was given a copy of some of these documents, including this one.
Buchenwald Prisoner Card, Ábrahám Paszternák
This Buchenwald prisoner card for Ábrahám Paszternák is from
the Library’s digital copy of the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive. This enormous document collection originated in efforts to trace the lost and missing in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust.
Paszternák’s Buchenwald card demonstrates how arbitrary the classification and identification of inmates in the Nazi camp system could be. For example, although he was arrested and deported from Hungary because he was a Jew, the triangle with a “U” for Ungar (Hungarian) appears on the upper right-hand corner of the card. The reason (Grund) given for his arrest in the left-hand column indicates that he was arrested as a Jewish-Hungarian political offender (Grund: Polit. Ungar-Jude). A single word Jüde [sic] is typed across the top of the card, and in the left-hand column his religion is listed as mos., which is an abbreviation of the German word mosaisch (commonly used at the time to refer to Judaism).
The library’s International Tracing Service digital archive researchers recieve enquiries every week about lost relatives from families and sometimes even Holocaust survivors themselves.
Documenting Persecution
Throughout the 1930s and ever since, the JCIO and later The Wiener Library collected documents recording Nazi persecution produced by Jews and Jewish groups.
Report of the Jewish Community of Vienna, January– February 1939, opened at a page showing the use of its soup kitchen
This report gives an indication of the impoverishment that Jews in Vienna were experiencing by 1939. The graph shows the huge and very rapid rise in the use of the Jewish Community of Vienna’s soup kitchen in early 1939.
Austria had been taken over by Germany in March 1938, an event that triggered an explosion of antisemitic violence in the country. The consequences of persecution and rising impoverishment for Vienna’s Jewish community can be seen starkly in this graph.
Around 130,000 Jews fled Austria at this time, and 66,000 Austrian Jews were ultimately murdered during the Holocaust.
B. Birnbach, Jews on the Hungarian-Czechoslovak border, November 1938
This photograph is one of a set of images held by The Wiener Holocaust Library depicting some of the Jews who were deported by far-right nationalist Slovak militias and the Hungarian authorities to a newly established Hungarian-Czechoslovak border region in 1938. Czechoslovakian authorities refused to allow the group entry. Stranded in a kind of no-man’s land between the two countries without proper supplies for a week, the deportees were given aid primarily by local Jewish communities.
The photographer is believed to be Berthold Birnbach, born in Vienna in 1903. He probably took these photos when he accompanied Jewish social workers to the Czechoslovakian- Hungarian borderland in late November 1938. Birnbach was murdered in 1942 in Łódz ghetto.
Thanks to the visionary founders of this extraordinary institution and its dedicated staff, Britain is blessed to have a world-class research library and archive on a subject of the utmost contemporary relevance.
Dame Margaret Hodge MP
Eyewitness Accounts of Kristallnacht, c.1939
These eyewitness accounts of some of the events of Kristallnacht, the attack on the Jewish communities of Germany and Austria on 9–10 November 1938, are some of the 350 reports collected by The Wiener Holocaust Library’s predecessor organisation, the JCIO, in Amsterdam in the immediate days and weeks following Kristallnacht.
Through its network of contacts in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, the JCIO received reports of the horrific attack from across the German Reich almost as soon as it began. The reports were mainly received in November and December 1938, and they were typed and collated in the form seen here in early 1939.
Ludwig Neumann, late December 1938
Ludwig Neumann (1896–1970) was one of the approximately 100,000 Jews who served in the German Army during the First World War, for which he was awarded an Iron Cross.
At the time of Kristallnacht in 1938, Neumann became one of the around 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to a concentration camp; in his case, Dachau near Munich. This photograph seems to have been taken by a family member on Neumann’s release from Dachau concentration camp in late December 1938. Ludwig Neumann had been released by the Nazi authorities on the condition that he emigrated, and Neumann produced multiple copies of this image: he may have used it to support applications for visas.
Neumann, his sister Luise and mother Dina were able to obtain visas to come to Britain before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Jewish Refugees
As Nazi persecution intensified, more Jews sought to leave Germany. The annexation of Austria in March 1938 saw a significant number of Austrian Jews flee; after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Jewish community groups and others in Britain sought to support Jews seeking refuge in Britain.
Simon Berlin family photographs, c. 1920s–1933
These photographs were donated to the Library in 2016 by the
estate of Wilhelm Simon’s son Bernard (Bernd) (1921–2015),
a German-Jewish refugee who arrived in Britain as a child in
autumn 1933. Bernard’s mother Gerty Simon (nee Cohn, 1887–
1970) was a prominent professional photographer in Berlin.
Record card from the Hampstead Garden Suburb Care
Committee collection, c.1939
This record card gives details of a twelve-year-old boy, Julius Blumenthal from Frankfurt, who sought refuge in Britain. It is part of the institutional records of a small charitable organisation set up to try to help children who sought to come to Britain on the Kindertransport rescue of around 10,000 mainly Jewish children, predominantly from Germany and Austria between late 1938 and early 1940. Julius Blumenthal’s record states that his mother was dead and his father in a concentration camp. His case is described as ‘very urgent’ and ‘desperate’.
German Jewish Aid Committee and the Jewish Board of Deputies, While You Are In England: Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee, c.1938
In 1938, as the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Britain increased, the German Jewish Aid Committee, founded in 1933 and also known as the Jewish Refugee Committee (JRC), stepped up its efforts to assist those arriving. This pamphlet was produced by the Committee and the Board of Deputies to help
refugees integrate into British life.
The content sometimes reflects the concerns that some in the Anglo-Jewish community had about the new Jewish refugees, and it includes advice to refugees to ‘refrain from speaking German in the streets’ and ‘do not make yourself conspicuous by speaking loudly’.
Charlotte Pilpel’s travel document with stamps, c.1939
This travel document is a form of passport belonging to Charlotte (Lotte) Pilpel. Pilpel was born in 1921 to a Jewish family in Vienna.
After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, life became increasingly difficult for the Pilpel family. In May 1939, Lotte Pilpel received permission to emigrate to Britain on a domestic service visa. In Britain, a shortage of servants had led to the establishment of this visa as one route by which migrants could enter the country.
In order to emigrate, Pilpel had to be declared medically fit by the British and the Nazi authorities, and the German authorities also required emigres to pay a flight tax and acquire exit and entry permits.
Documenting the Holocaust and Genocide
As the persecution of Jews across Europe intensified during the war, The Wiener Library gathered evidence documenting the mass murder. After the war, Library staff continued this work. The Library also collects material relating to other genocides.
Jewish News: A bulletin issued periodically by the Jewish Central Information Office, 1942
Between 1939 and 1945, from its base in London, the Library’s predecessor organisation the JCIO distributed information gathered by its employees concerning the war. Increasingly,
their work documented escalating persecution and genocide directed against Jews. The Jewish News drew attention to mass murder at Auschwitz on several occasions, most
strikingly via the report of an escaped prisoner relayed first to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
and then onwards to recipients of the second bulletin issued on 29 January 1942, a little more
than a week after the Wannsee conference had taken place outside Berlin.
The Polish Government-in-Exile, The Mass
Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, London, c.1943
The pamphlet made public the contents of a note of 10 December 1942 addressed by the Polish government-in-exile to the United Nations detailing the mass extermination of Jews in the Polish territories occupied by Germany. It had been produced at the urging of Polish Jewish underground groups, who had collected and
supplied much of the information.
Shortly afterwards, the British and US governments issued a joint Allied declaration, describing the Nazi persecution of Jews
in Europe. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden MP, read the declaration in the House of Commons, and in the following days it was widely reported in the press.
Rachel Auerbach, Oyf di Felder fun Treblinka (‘In the Fields of Treblinka’), 1947
Rachel Auerbach (1903–1976) was involved in Emmanuel Ringelblum’s underground Oyneg Shabes (‘Joy of Sabbath’) group, who gathered evidence and testimonies from the Warsaw
Ghetto. She later established survivor reports as an important aspect of evidence about the Holocaust.
In this Yiddish-language pamphlet, In the Fields of Treblinka, published in 1947, Auerbach revealed early evidence about the extermination camp of Treblinka. The Wiener Holocaust Library holds a copy of this important pamphlet
Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, 1934
Originally published in Germany in 1933, this book has been credited with awakening the world to the genocide inflicted on the Armenian nation during the First World War. Many contemporaries saw parallels between the events described in this book and the rise of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s.
The Armenian Genocide was the mass murder of between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians by the nationalist ruling party of the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also known as the Young Turks), between 1915 and 1916.
A selection of the journals of Philipp Manes, produced in Theresienstadt, 1942–1944
Philipp Manes (1875-1944) was a German Jew and a prolific writer with a lifelong habit of keeping records of his experiences. In July 1942, the Nazis deported Manes and his wife to Theresienstadt ghetto. In the ghetto, Manes organised a cultural programme
as head of the Orientation Service. Conditions in the Theresienstadt ghetto, although appalling, were better than those in many other ghettos. This allowed for the creation of extensive cultural and educational programmes. Over 500 lectures were held, organised in part by Philipp Manes.
Philipp Manes and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz in late 1944. Manes’ journals survived and were sent to one of his friends after the war, and then to his family. Philipp Manes’ daughter Eve eventually deposited them with The Wiener Library.
The audience at a children’s play in the Łódź ghetto, c.1940–43
The Łódź ghetto in German-occupied Poland was the second largest ghetto in occupied Europe, after Warsaw. Established in 1940, 210,000 Jews were held there. The ghetto became a large industrial centre and it was only finally liquidated in 1944.
This photograph of an evening at a play reflects the cultural life of the ghetto. Its origins are uncertain, however: we do not know who took the photograph or how it came to be in our collections. The head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Chaim Rumkowski, is pictured second on the right in the first row. Rumkowski was widely resented, and he was likely killed by other prisoners on his arrival in Auschwitz.
Testimonies
The Wiener Holocaust Library has a long history of collecting eyewitness accounts of Nazi atrocities, including some of the earliest accounts by survivors of the Holocaust, and the set of over 1,000 testimonies gathered by the Library’s Director of Research Eva Reichmann and her colleagues in the 1950s. In recent years, the Library has also received important visual accounts of the genocide in Darfur.
Eva Reichmann photographed at The Wiener Library in London, 1952
Reichmann was the Director of Research at the Library, where she led an ambitious project to collect and record eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust from across Europe. Reichmann and her team gathered reports from refugees, survivors and others, in Britain and abroad. The project amassed more than 1,300 reports in seven different languages.
Many of our eyewitness accounts are now translated into English and available online for new generations of Holocaust researchers: www.testifyingtothetruth.co.uk
A report by Richard and Charlotte Holzer, surviving members of the Baum Group, about the group’s activities, 1957
This is a document from the Library’s Eyewitness Accounts collection. Charlotte Holzer was sentenced to death in 1943 for her role in the Baum Group, an anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, but managed to escape from a prison hospital in 1944. Charlotte and Richard Holzer married after the war and lived in East Germany.
At the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Baum group distributed leaflets publicising the brutality and atrocities of the invasion. On 18 May 1942, they carried out an arson attack on an anti-communist and antisemitic Nazi exhibition called Soviet Paradise. Most of those involved in the bombing were arrested and executed.
The eyewitness account of Hermine Horvath, 1958
In 1958 in Vienna a Wiener Library researcher interviewed Hermine Horvath, a Roma woman originally from Burgenland in Austria. This is a rare example of a testimony by a Romani survivor from this time. Unusually for an account taken during this period, Horvath was very candid about the sexual abuse she experienced and witnessed at the hands of the SS.
In this document, Horvath describes the situation for her family after the German takeover of Austria in March 1938. Her father was deported to Dachau concentration camp in June 1938. Later, following her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, Horvath recounts how she witnessed the rape and murder of two Romani children by an SS officer in Auschwitz.
Hermine Horvath died at 33, shortly after her testimony was given, likely as a result of the privations she had suffered as a camp inmate, slave labourer and victim of forced experimentation.
John Dalmau, Slave Worker in the Channel Islands, 1956
The author of this pamphlet, John Dalmau, was a Republican soldier of the Spanish Civil War who had joined the French Army and was captured by the Germans in 1940. He was forced to work on the construction of the Atlantic Wall in northern France, and then sent to work in German-occupied Jersey and Alderney, where he witnessed horrific brutality and the starvation of prisoners. In 1943, Dalmau was involved in the sabotage of a German vessel. After the war, Dalmau settled in Guernsey and had a family.
In excess of 1,000 foreign forced and slave labourers died in the Channel Islands during the occupation, mainly from maltreatment. Between 437 and 1,000 predominately Soviet citizens died in Alderney alone. On 9 May 1945, the Channel Islands became the last place to be liberated from Nazi occupation.
Mordechai Lichtenstein, Eighteen Months in the Oświęcim Extermination Camp, 1945
This pamphlet was published by the Jewish Central Information Office (as The Wiener Library was then still officially known) in London in 1945. It is one of the earliest accounts produced by a survivor of Auschwitz. The circumstances in which the account came to be gathered are outlined at the start of the report:
“One of the few survivors of the horrors of the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland, paid a visit to our London Institute shortly after he reached Great Britain on the last stage of his recent escape.
We have carefully checked our informant’s identity and
reliability, and are certain that his report is true in every detail.”
Drawings by child survivors of genocide, Darfur, 2007
This is one of over 500 drawings donated to the Library in 2014 by Waging Peace, a human rights organisation that campaigns against genocide and human rights abuses in Sudan and supports Sudanese refugees to Britain. The drawings were made by child survivors of the genocide, which was perpetrated by deposed President Omar al Bashir’s Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed militia against non-Arab Darfuri people from 2003. They were collected by an anonymous Waging Peace researcher in June and July 2007.
While the researcher was collecting testimonies from adults, women told them how their children had witnessed horrendous sights when their villages were attacked by Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed militia. The researcher gave children aged 6–18 pen and paper and asked them to draw what they remembered.
In 2009, the International Criminal Court accepted many of these drawings as contextual evidence of the crimes committed in Darfur.
Resistance
The Wiener Holocaust Library has many documents that attest to the resistance of Jews and others during the Holocaust.
Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), Und Sie Bewegt Sich Doch! Freie Deutsche Dichtung (And Yet it Moves! Free German Poetry), 1943
Published in London during the war by a German exile group, this book of anti-fascist verse was designed by artist John Heartfield and features a foreword by Oscar Kokoschka.
The artist John Heartfield (1891-1968) was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin. Herzfeld began to style himself by the English-sounding name John Heartfield during the First World War in protest at the virulent anti-British sentiment he encountered in Berlin. Known as a fierce opponent of Nazism, Heartfield was sought by the Gestapo from shortly after the Nazi accession to power in 1933. He fled on foot to Czechoslovakia. Later, Heartfield came as a refugee to Britain. After the war he was refused permission to settle in Britain and went to live in East Berlin in 1950.
Heartfield designed this volume and produced its satirical cover
illustration, which depicts Hitler as an ape bestriding the world. Despite Hitler’s attempts at world domination, the earth is depicted as still spinning on its axis; something that is reflected in the title of the book: Und Sie Bewegt Doch! – ‘and still it moves!’, which is in turn a statement that is supposed to have been made by Galileo Galilei after he was forced by the Inquisition to renounce the idea that the earth is in motion.
Certificate from the Swedish Embassy in Budapest signed by Raoul Wallenberg, 1944
This certificate, issued by the Swedish Embassy in Budapest and
signed by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, authorised George
Brody to act as caretaker for a block of flats which was used by the
Swedish Embassy as a safe haven for Hungarian Jews. This document helped to ensure that Brody was not deported to a camp.
After the occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Swedish delegation there launched a rescue operation to save Jews from being deported. Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews by issuing protective passes (Schutzpass). He disappeared in January 1945 after being taken by Soviet soldiers. The document is part of a collection of family papers donated to the Library by the Hungarian-Jewish Brody-Pauncz family in 1986.
After the War
The ‘Boys’ arriving in Windermere, 1945
After the end of the Second World War, the British government granted asylum to 1000 child survivors of the Holocaust. Only 732 survivors were located and of these the vast majority were male. As a result, upon arrival in the Lake District in August 1945, the group became collectively known as ‘The Boys’, despite the presence of around 200 girls.
The boy holding the young child in this photograph is Sidney Finkel, who survived the ghetto in Piotrkow, a forced labour camp in Poland, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt. More information about the picture and Sidney’s story can be found by consulting his memoir.
The man recieving the young child is Finkel’s older brother Isaac who survived ghettos, forced labour camps and Buchenwald. The boy right next to Sidney Finkel (with suitcase in hand) has been identified as Moniek Shannon. He too survived a ghetto, forced labour camp, Buchenwald and a death march to Theresienstadt. The image comes from the Library’s collection of documents relating to the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), an Anglo-Jewish organisation that supported displaced persons and Holocaust survivors from 1943-50.
The Wiener Holocaust Library at Ninety
In 2024 we celebrated 90 years of the Wiener Holocaust Library. Today the Library houses the largest collection of Holocaust-era material in the UK, and one of the oldest collections in the world.
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Photography: Stephen Morris