The Couch
I fell in love with that couch the first time I saw it in the window of a neighborhood store in New York City.
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Meeting Luigi
I’d like to share about a very meaningful day at the Museum, April 10, 2024. A group of survivors were asked to meet with a visiting photographer to participate in an ongoing project.
Maly Trostenets
On January 27, 2014, the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day in January 1945 when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz camp complex in German-occupied Poland.
Loves Explored
On a recent Saturday morning, I felt the slight touch of a hand on my face. It was Jackson, our seven-year-old grandson, with a big smile on his cheery face.
Holocaust Denial
A knock on the door startled me. It was the fall of 1993, and I was in my office at the college, reviewing my lecture notes for the day.
Waterways
The Vltava River, called the Moldau in German, is the longest river in the Czech Republic, running along the Bohemian forests and then meeting the Elbe at Melnik flowing toward Prague. It is called the Czech national river.
First Week in America
As we got closer to America, the sea became smooth and life returned to normal. The SS Nieuw Amsterdam finally entered New York Harbor on the evening of November 8, 1948.
Dresden
The scenes from the bombed-out buildings, destroyed cars and buses, and citizens fleeing for their lives in Ukraine remind me of the bombings in Prague during World War II and what I saw three years later in the city of Dresden, Germany.
An Image that Brings Back a Memory
It was the sixth year of the German occupation of Prague—on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1944. On most Sundays, my mother, Zdenka, and I and my mother’s sister, Olga, and her two children, Gerti, age 12, and Robert, age eight, would visit my Catholic grandparents’ apartment in downtown Prague. The two fathers were missing—both were on “business trips.”
Manufactured Reality
Masha Gessen, a Russian American journalist and author, has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. Gessen has called what passes as news in Russia as “manufactured reality,” which refers to the daily stories covered by state-controlled media. Among Putin’s distortions are his argument that Ukraine is not a nation, that Ukrainians are not a people, and that the invasion and killing of civilians is not a war but a “special military operation.” The stated aim of Putin’s action was to “demilitarize and denazify” a country of 40 million people, which is led by a Jewish president who was elected democratically by 70 percent of the population. The ousted head of the leading Russian public opinion research organization states that current Russian propaganda is full of “lies and hatred on the fantastical scale.”
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Survivor Reflections and Testimonies
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.