For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

• Uncovering Hidden (Hi)stories

  The final episode of the third series of the EHRI podcast takes a step back to look at micro-archives in a more general sense. In keeping with our theme, however, we also focus on an object that teaches us more about the Holocaust. An object that represents both the richness of sources that can be found in micro-archives and the challenges that those working with them face. Our object of focus is a black and white photograph, depicting a group of prisoners dressed in the distinctive striped uniforms of Nazi concentration camps and walking along a corridor of barbed wire fencing. In the photograph, there is a woman in the fourth row from the front, circled in yellow. The woman’s name is Suzana Schossberger (Šosberger), and the photograph was taken by a Soviet military officer when Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Her son Mirko Stefanović remembers that his mother kept the photograph on a bookshelf in the living room, unframed and turned around. Mirko recalls how he never spoke to his mother about her imprisonment in Auschwitz even though she never tried to hide her experience and wore her tattooed prisoner number visibly. The photograph came to the attention of Dr. Dora Komnenović, our guest for this episode, following a call launched by the Jewish Community of Novi Sad in preparation for the workshop "Archival Basics: A Hands-On Workshop for Micro-Archives”. This workshop was one of the several EHRI workshops for micro-archives organized by the German Federal Archives and other EHRI partners.  Mirko answered the call almost immediately to contribute his mother’s remarkable photograph. He did this, as he explains in the testimony we hear in the episode, because of the responsibility he feels as part of the generation of survivors’ children to help preserve the memory of the Holocaust for the future. The photograph is important not only because of its subject matter, but because it represents the challenging first step towards building relationships with non-traditional archives. In the further exchanges Dora had with Mirko, she also found out about an oral testimony that Mirko's mother gave to Yad Vashem in the 1990s. Mirko explained that he only listened to his mother’s testimony after her death and that he was not comfortable sharing it. This highlights the complex and emotionally charged nature of collecting such archival material from individuals and the relatives of survivors. Suzana Schossberger was born and lived in Novi Sad, Serbia. She was the co-owner of a knitwear factory when, in April 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz along with her infant son, Andrija Schossberger and her father, Mirko Erdeš. Andrija and Mirko were sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival and were murdered. Her husband, Tibor Schossberger, died of typhus as a prisoner of war.Suzanna was selected by Mengele as a subject for experimentation. She was kept for some months in the hospital and subjected to unimaginable horrors before she could escape to the wider barracks where she managed to remain until the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers in January 1945. Dr. Dora Komnenovic is a research associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and an employee of the Federal Archives/Stasi Records Archive in Berlin. Podcast host is Katharina Freise. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

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  29:58
• The Writings of a Wandering Poet

  In this podcast episode, we learn about a remarkable manuscript that survived the Holocaust and was later discovered to be the work of one of the most interesting modern creators of Hebrew literature in the 20th century: David Vogel. The manuscript is made up of pages upon pages of miniscule, uniform handwriting and was hidden by Vogel in the back garden of the boarding house in Hauteville, France where he was staying before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Vogel was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 52, but his writings and the story of his life live on to inspire, inform and commemorate the turbulent 1930s in Europe.   Vogel was born in Staniv in the Podolia region in 1891, then in the Russian empire and today in Ukraine. He moved to Vilnius, where he attended yeshiva, and then in 1912 to Vienna - the center of literature and culture during the Fin de siècle. At the beginning of the First World War Vogel was imprisoned in Vienna – and not for the last time in his short life - as he was considered a subject of an enemy country; Russia. He met and married Ada Nadler, with whom he had one daughter, Tamara. In 1925 they moved to Paris, the city of lights that beckoned him and the literary and artistic people of its time.  We are joined in this episode by Amir Ben-Amram, archivist at The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world, who will talk us through the fascinating journey behind this discovery. From the manuscript's burial in Hauteville, France, we follow its voyage across Europe and the sea to America, passing through the hands of Vogel's close friend, and painter, Avraham Goldberg, to Shimon Halkin, writer and poet and finally to Asher Barash, chairman of the Hebrew Writers' Association and founder of the Gnazim Archive, where it found its final resting place. The manuscript is now part of the collection of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association.Featured guests: Amir Ben-Amram is an archivist at the Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.  Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

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  29:09
• The Lost letter

  In this episode, a lost letter tells the extraordinary story of Tommy Benford Junior, a baby boy born in Paris in 1939 and saved by the incredible bravery of a Dutch woman called Truus Wijsmuller.  To look at, the letter is simple, and formally written, but it contains a father's desperate plea to save his son.   Tommy Benford Junior was born in Paris in 1939. His father was an accomplished American jazz drummer, and his mother, Sophia Mezzaro, was a dancer, singer and pianist from Vienna. Sophia died giving birth to their son in 1939, and Thomas Benford Senior was left unable to care for him and work to provide a living for them both. Poor economic conditions after the outbreak of war and the threat of fascism spreading across Europe meant that Tommy's father needed to return with his band to the US and couldn't take his son with him. Unwilling to leave Europe without knowing that his son was in safe hands, Tommy Benford Senior wrote to the American Consulate in Paris, which led to Tommy Junior being collected by Truus, who agreed to take 14-month year old Tommy Junior from Paris to Amsterdam, where she personally cared for him for 9 weeks.    Joining us to tell this story are Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Their documentary not only brings to light the incredible bravery of Truus Wijsmuller, who was leading the efforts of the "Kindertransport" that saved the  lives of more than 10,000 children during the Second World War, but also captures the moment that Tommy Benford Junior read the letter from his father to Mrs Wijsmuller, and learnt the truth about the efforts that went into saving his life.  In addition to speaking to Tommy Benford Junior, Sturhoofd and van Tijn were able to speak to 23 people who were saved as children by Truus Wijsmuller in the process of making their documentary. Since it’s completion, they’ve met a further 3.  Featured guests: Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, are directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.  Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

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  33:53
• A Place of Paradise

  In this episode, the object of our focus is a black and white photograph that offers a harrowing glimpse into the narrow survival of Nazi camp prisoners. Two of the survivors in this image would later travel to the ‘paradise’ of Windermere, in the Lake District in England, on 14 August 1945. The image contains a stark contrast; the jubilant gestures of greeting from the gaggle of young survivors sits in juxtaposition with the cargo train they are loaded onto, a vehicle normally used for transporting goods and chattel and speaks to the extraordinary nature of the story behind it.  The photo is remarkable, not least because it captured the precise moment of liberation on May 8th, 1945, for many of the young survivors - who were meant to be taken to Theresienstadt camp ghetto - but because the train contains two young Jewish survivors who later became known as part of "The Windermere Group".  The podcast focuses on Ike Alterman, one of the 300 young Jewish orphans who were selected to travel to Windermere for recuperation. Ike survived no less than four concentration camps and multiple death marches by the time he was sixteen, and it is because of him that this photograph, along with many others, has found its way into the safekeeping of The Lake District Holocaust Project. We hear from Ike’s testimony in this episode, and how this photograph was taken only minutes after the survivors found out that they had been freed.  Ike Alterman was born in 1928 in Ożarów, Poland to a large, Orthodox Jewish family. His upbringing was happy, but his life and that of his family was changed in the short matter of weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Ożarów was taken over by the Nazis and made into its own Ghetto which meant that whilst his family were not forcibly removed, the conditions of their lives changed drastically and for two years they lived in fear, poverty and persecution. After two years, the horrible moment came in which Ike’s family were separated; his mother, brother and sisters were sent to Treblinka, never to be heard of again. Ike and his father were taken to Blyzin as slave labourers, but were later separated too. Aged only thirteen or fourteen, Ike was alone in a horrific system of violence.  Ike was transported from Blyzin to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then from there to Buchenwald by way of a death march, finally arriving in Theresienstadt in 1945. Through Ike’s powerful testimony, we hear the atrocities of life in these camps. What makes his testimony unique, as is discussed in this episode, is that Ike’s work at Auschwitz-Birkenau put him in the unusual position of entering the crematoriums used as part of the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ to collect clothes, making Ike one of the last living survivors who actually witnessed such crematoriums in operation and the atrocities they concealed. Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

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  34:39
• The Stamp of Samuilo Demajo

  In this episode, we focus on a stamp, printed on the inside jacket of a book donated to the National Library of Serbia in 1941.  The stamp is remarkable not least because it belonged to a prominent Belgrade lawyer named Samuilo Demajo, whose family was murdered in May 1942 in a Dušegupka, a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas van. Though Demajo's life was abruptly ended, his legacy lives on in this and the approximately 200 other books that he donated in an effort to rebuild the public library.  Demajo was born in 1898 into a prominent Belgrade Jewish family, doing his Military Service after the First World War before studying law and becoming a lawyer. As an active member of his community, he was involved in social initiatives and local politics as well as a member of the Belgrade City Assembly.  After the National Library of Serbia was bombed by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe and its precious collections destroyed by fire between 6 - 9 April 1941, a public call was put out for donations to rebuild the library's collection. 6th April 1941 also marked the beginning of World War II in former Yugoslavia and the control of Belgrade as well as other parts of German-occupied Serbia by the "Militärbefehlshaber Serbien" (territory of the military commander in Serbia). Persecution of Serbian Jews began immediately, with strict laws and restrictions against their movement, rights, employment and citizenship. Nevertheless, in May 1941, Samuilo Demajo responded to the public call of the library and made the generous offer of a donation of 133 "works from all fields of science and literature". Due to the restrictive laws against Jews, it was prohibited for Demajo’s donation to be accepted, but the then-director of the National Library corresponded with the German authorities and an exception was made.  Demajo later added around 60 bound volumes of newspapers and magazines, stenographic notes from the National Assembly, and collections of laws and decrees.  The stamp was found by Andreas Roth, who was doing research in the National Library of Serbia in 2014.  The discovery led to Andreas conducting a research project with a teacher colleague and a handful of history students, to try to uncover the story behind the stamp and retrace the lost history of the Demajo family.  Through their research, the group were able to identify the history of the family and uncover details about their lives in Serbia before the war, after the occupation and ultimately leading to their tragic murders in May 1942.   Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

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  34:11

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