Archival Descriptions

Displaying items 16,361 to 16,380 of 33,375
Language of Description: English
  1. Jewish medical resistance in the Vilnius ghetto during the Holocaust

    Contains a typescript text entitled "Jewish Medical Resistance in the Vilnius Ghetto…", 113 pages, plus endnotes and copies of photos.

  2. Martha Michelsohn - Chelmno

    Martha Michelson was the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher in Chelmno. She talks about the Sonderkommando, Jews killed in a church, the terrible smell that pervaded the town when bodies were burned, the Poles' attitude toward the Jews, and the operation of gas vans. She says that she told people in Germany about the extermination in 1942 or 1943 but they accused her of spreading atrocity propaganda. FILM ID 3352 -- Camera Rolls #1-3 -- 01:00:00 to 01:32:09 Lanzmann asks Michelson for help understanding what things were like in Chelmno. She says that conditions were very primitive: no running wat...

  3. Malka Goldberg - Warsaw

    FILM ID 3869 -- Camera Rolls Goldberg 176,177 No clapperboard. Audio operator speaking French and street noise to 1:34. Lanzmann and Corinna Coulmas start by asking Malka Abramson Goldberg about her business, children, and grandchildren. Goldberg then tells them that she was in the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Malhof before immigrating first to Sweden and then to the city in which the interview takes place (probably Tel Aviv). At Lanzmann's prompting, Goldberg explains that she was part of the resistance, but does not remember specific dates such as when she was arre...

  4. Peter Bergson and Samuel Merlin - New York

    Peter Bergson and Samuel Merlin were activists in the United States during the war. They talk about conflicts with other Jewish groups, especially with Rabbi Stephen Wise. Bergson and his group organized the the We Will Never Die pageant and made other bold publicity moves aimed at influencing American policy in favor of helping the Jews of Europe. FILM ID 3254 -- Camera Rolls #48-50-- 01:00:18 to 01:33:18 Roll 48 01:00:18 Claude Lanzmann, Peter Bergson and Samuel Merlin sit inside a small meeting room around a table in New York City. Lanzmann, off-camera, asks the men about how the general...

  5. Maurice Rossel - Red Cross

    As a representative of the Swiss Red Cross in 1944, Maurice Rossel was asked to inspect Theresienstadt. He admits that he gave Theresienstadt a clean bill of health and would probably do so again today. He was also given a tour of Auschwitz, which he did not realize was a death camp. Lanzmann's questioning points to the degree to which Rossel and others were manipulated by the Nazis and to what extent they were willing to be fooled because of their own politics and prejudices. This interview is the basis of Lanzmann's 1999 documentary "A Visitor from the Living" [Un vivant qui passe]. FILM ...

  6. Birthday card from Peterswaldau camp

    Birthday card made by prisoners of the Peterswaldau concentration camp for a fellow prisoner, Rose Hersz (later Futter). Inscribed; translation, recto: "From early morning we have carried the sweet obligation to congratulate you on your birthday. What should we wish you? If you were to have a little chocolate cake today instead of the nuts and bolts [of the workshop] that would improve your spirits. Oh, now we know [what to wish you]! We wish that one week from today you will be with your loved ones and in your own place; that you will be able to be happy and free and to live a renewed life."

  7. Rudolf Vrba - Auschwitz

    Rudolf Vrba was a Slovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944 in hopes of warning the world about the imminent destruction of the Hungarian Jews and inciting the Jews to revolt. He describes working on the arrival ramp for ten months and witnessing as Jews from various countries went to the gas chambers. He and Lanzmann debate the culpability of the Jewish council members and other Jewish leaders, who Vrba describes as traitors who collaborated with the Nazis. FILM ID 3226 -- Camera Rolls #98,99 -- 01:00:00 to 01:22:24 CR 98: Rudolf Vrba and Claude Lanzmann sit on a bench in Cent...

  8. Stamp booklet with canceled Republic of China postage stamps

    Booklet filled with 216 canceled Republic of China postage stamps that belonged to Rudolf Abraham. After the Nazi regime took power in Germany in 1933, laws were passed to persecute the Jewish population. The family butcher shop struggled when Jewish businesses were boycotted and Jews were forbidden from practicing certain trades. Rudolf was arrested during Kristallnacht in November 1938. His family got him released in December, but he had to leave the country. Rudolf left for Shanghai, China, and in August 1940, he reached the United States.

  9. Germans and Czechs in the Sudetenland

    Reel 2 Anna lives with her German father Mayor Jobst at a rural estate near Budweis in the Sudetenland. Her mother, of Czech origin, killed herself because of an unfulfilled desire to return to her native town of Prague. Already engaged to a young peasant from the village, Anna is attracted to the engineer Christian Leidwein from Prague and travels to the 'Golden City' to visit him. While staying with the family of her mother and working in their tobacco store, she is seduced and made-pregnant by cousin Toni Opferkuch. Her changing morals are accompanied by her changing appearance -- jewelr...

  10. Siegmunt Forst

    Siegmunt Forst escaped Vienna and moved to New York after the war broke out. He talks about his dealings with Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, a Slovakian Jew who tried desperately to tell the world what was happening to the European Jews. Weissmandel begged American Jewish leaders and others for money with which to bribe the Nazis. Lanzmann is interested in the individual and collective choices about whether to resist and/or to rescue, and in this interview and others he clearly views Weissmandel as an important figure. FILM ID 3119 -- Camera Rolls #12,14,15,17 -- 01:00:02 to 01:38:00 Lanzmann a...

  11. Abraham Bomba - Treblinka

    Abraham Bomba, a barber from Czestochowa, Poland, is featured prominently in the film Shoah. In the outtakes interview he talks about the treatment the Jews received when the Germans first arrived in his town, deportation to Treblinka, and his work cutting the hair of people right before they entered the gas chambers. Bomba escaped from Treblinka and tried to warn the remaining residents of Czestochowa but they did not believe him. In his memoirs published in 2009, Lanzmann calls Bomba "one of the heroes of my film." FILM ID 3197 -- Camera Rolls #1-3A -- 01:00:06 to 01:33:59 Lanzmann asks B...

  12. Yehuda Lerner - Sobibor

    One of the leaders of the revolt in Sobibor, Lerner talks about his knack for escaping from camps - he escaped from eight camps before arriving at Sobibor. He relates the Sobibor revolt in great detail, including his role in killing two Germans. Lanzmann found this interview so compelling that he used none of it in Shoah but instead made a separate film about Lerner, called "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M." The interview took place over four hours in Mr. Lerner's apartment in Jerusalem. FILM ID 3334 -- Camera Rolls #1-3 -- 01:00:07 to 01:33:27 01:00:46 Lerner, seated in front of a window ...

  13. Postage stamp

  14. A memoir

    Contains a one-page testimony of a former forced laborer in Romania.

  15. Nazi feature film on espionage, British agents, German rearmament

    Plot summary: In this feature film set in 1936, Mr. Morris operates a British espionage ring based in Berlin that is eager to receive information about secret German rearmament plans. He is successful when he bribes a broke engineer involved in the construction of a new artillery cannon and places an agent in a military airport testing a new type of bomber. However, when Morris deliberately makes the acquaintance with the girlfriend of Hans Klemm, a soldier running in new tanks, he encounters trouble. He initially makes some progress by utilizing the soldier's friendliness and naiveté, but ...

  16. Jan Piwonski - Sobibor

    Jan Piwonski gives a detailed description of the extermination process at Sobibor. He also provides a harrowing account of the brutal treatment the Jews received in the process of building the camp. He could hear the screams of the victims from his home three kilometers from the camp. Lanzmann quizzes him about relations between the Poles and the Jews. Piwonski says that the Poles were surprised by the Jews' lack of resistance. FILM ID 3339 -- Camera Rolls #7-8 -- 01:00:08 to 01:18:05 Lanzmann and Piwonski are seated outside on a bench in front of a small building speaking through translato...

  17. Defendants at Medical trial; Welt Im Film: Berchtesgaden and US diplomats in Stuttgart

    War Crimes Trials - Subsequent Trial Proceedings, Case 1 (Medical Case), Nuremberg, Germany. Scenes of defendants Genzken, Blome, and Rose making their statements. CU, judge. 00:05:45 Welt Im Film. Obersalzberg Today (CAD) Pan, ruins of Berchtesgaden. Bomb damaged Berghof. INTs of the Berghof's air raid shelter. Pan and shots, the countryside showing the damaged country home of former Nazi officials. Martin Bormann's villa totally destroyed. The damaged SS barracks. American soldiers and some civilians enter the underground shelter of Hitler's Eagles Nest. View of the mountains. Byrnes in S...

  18. Bronia Feit memoir

    Contains a testimony, typescript, 16 pages, recounting the invasion and occupation of the author's hometown in Poland from 1939 onward.

  19. Mordechai Podchlebnik - Chelmno

    Mordechai (Michael) Podchlebnik recognized the corpses of his wife and children when unloading bodies from a gas van at Chelmno. He was a witness at many postwar trials, including the Eichmann trial. He tells Lanzmann of his escape from Chelmno and how he tried to inform people about Chelmno, but he was not believed at first, until his story was corroborated by another escaped prisoner. FILM ID 3294 -- Camera Rolls #1-7 -- 01:00:16 to 01:32:27 Lanzmann is seated with Podchlebnik at a table surrounded by windows. Off camera is an interpreter, Fanny Apfelbaum. The tape jumps frequently and th...

  20. Robin Dawidowicz papers

    Contains two black-and-white photographs of Robin Dawidowicz [donor] with handwritten notations on reverse; a photocopy of certification of donor's concentration camp internment, and thus he is eligible to become a member of ZBoWiD (Association of Fighters for Liberty and Democracy); and handwritten letter from donor to "Chairman of Council to Memorialize the Extermination of Jews," mentioning his imprisonment in Mauthausen and his escape from Kielce in 1946.