Curator Kyra Schuster recounts the serendipitous story of how the Museum came to acquire the puppet that US Army medic Eldon Nicholas used to entertain children at the Vittel internment camp in France.
Librarian Ron Coleman is joined by Susan Warsinger, a Holocaust survivor whose escape from Nazi-occupied Europe is documented in one of the collection’s over 20,000 files.
Curator Teresa Pollin recounts the story of how a single, unusual photograph spared Moshe Mandil’s family from arrest by Germans and how a young Albanian Muslim man ultimately saved their lives.
Curator Susan Snyder shares the story behind the donation of a young girl’s green sweater—a gift the girl received from her grandmother and wore while hiding from the Nazis in the sewers of Lvov, Poland, for 14 months.
Kurt Lewin, son of the chief rabbi of Lvov, survived the Holocaust by hiding as a young monk. As archivist Rebecca Erbelding explains, the collection of documents Lewin donated to the Museum is rare in its ability to show the changing identities of a person before, during, and after being in hiding.
After the Holocaust, the British government provided aid to more than 700 child survivors, several of whom came under the nurturing care of Alice Goldberger at Weir Courtney, a donated English estate. Archivist Rebecca Erbelding shares writings and drawings the children made for Alice, depicting happy scenes from their postwar lives.
Curator Susan Snyder discusses the significance of the Museum’s Morris Troper Collection, which documents the efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee European chief to negotiate safe refuge for those who fled the Third Reich aboard the St. Louis in 1939.
With the tacit approval and diplomatic authority of the Salvadoran consul in Switzerland, George Mandel-Mantello, a Hungarian Jew, launched an effort to rescue thousands of Jews across the continent. Judy Cohen, director of the Museum’s photo archives, shares his story.
Photo archivist Judith Cohen describes how a scrapbook and memory book from the Michael Gruenbaum Collection provide a rare view into life in Theresienstadt, the Nazis' "model" camp-ghetto.
Visual documentation of Jewish spiritual practice in the camps is rare. Curator Kyra Schuster’s pursuit of a photo of a prisoner at Gurs lighting Hannukah candles led her to a whole family’s collection of documents that is unique in many ways.
Look through a curated list of frequently searched collection types and themes.