Archival Descriptions

Displaying items 1 to 20 of 22,191
Language of Description: English
Holding Institution: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  1. Benjamin Murmelstein - Theresienstadt Judenaelteste

    Benjamin Murmelstein, a rabbi and intellectual, worked closely with Adolf Eichmann in Vienna and became the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt. He defends his behavior against the many who have criticized him since the war and provides important details about the functioning of Eichmann's Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The sound on these tapes is problematic. Claude Lanzmann's questions are sometimes inaudible (they often do not appear in the transcripts). The audio sometimes outlasts the video image. The first few tapes show Murmelstein and Lanzmann outside on a balco...

  2. Treblinka (TR)

    Location filming of Treblinka camp and Malkinia train station for SHOAH. Includes short interviews with Polish people living around the Treblinka camp in Iladou, Poniatowo, and Wolka Okraglik, Poland. Lanzmann talks with Polish men and women who describe having lived and worked in the fields in the shadow of Treblinka during its operation. They describe being forbidden to look that direction, the Ukrainians who worked in the camp, the scene at the train station when transports arrived, and the effects of the weather on the Jews. Lanzmann visits the quay where trains stopped at the entrance ...

  3. Richard Glazar - Treblinka

    Richard Glazar, a survivor of Treblinka, is another individual featured prominently in Shoah. In the outtakes, he talks about his Czech heritage, Theresienstadt, his experiences at Treblinka, and witnessing the transports as they arrived from Grodno, Bialystok, Saloniki, and other places. He also describes the prisoner revolt on August 2, 1943 and his escape from the camp. FILM ID 3314 -- Camera Rolls #1-3 -- 01:00:03 to 01:34:05 CR1 Glazar sits on a couch in front of a window. Church bells ring periodically throughout the interview. He talks about his early life: he was born in a small tow...

  4. Inge Deutschkron

    Inge Deutschkron, a German Jew who appears only briefly in Lanzmann's completed film, witnessed the increasing persecution and violence in Berlin, including the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. Her father escaped to England but she and her mother remained behind and went into hiding in 1943. Lanzmann interviews her in a coffee house in Berlin in which she remembers seeing a "Jews Not Wanted" sign during the Nazi years. FILM ID 3420 -- Camera Rolls #1-3 -- 01:00:08 to 01:33:06 CR 1 Inge Deutschkron sits in a café speaking with Lanzmann. She expresses feeling strange, sin...

  5. Raul Hilberg

    Raul Hilberg is the author of the seminal book, "The Destruction of the European Jews." In this interview with Claude Lanzmann for SHOAH, Hilberg discusses several aspects of his research, including the culpability of the German railways in the deportation process of European Jews, as well as the significant roles Adam Czerniakow and Rudolf Kasztner played in the genocide of the European Jews. Hilberg also addresses the general bureaucratic processes at work in the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Hilberg is filmed in his home in Burlington, Vermont and on campus at the University of V...

  6. 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...

  7. Hans Gewecke

    Lanzmann used a false name and filmed this interview with a hidden camera. See his description of filming Gewecke in his memoir The Patagonian Hare, published 2009 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux, pages 456-457. Gewecke was the Gebietskommissar of Siauliai, Lithuania. In 1971 he was convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison for participation in the execution of a Jewish baker for smuggling. Gewecke is evasive about when he arrived in Siauliai, stating that the killing actions there took place "before my time." He claims that he was not a crass anti-Semite and provides as proof...

  8. Christopher R. Browning papers

    The Christopher R. Browning papers consist of Browning’s expert reports, correspondence, court records, photocopies of historical evidentiary materials, indexes, preparatory and background materials for trial, printed materials, and witness testimony gathered or created during preparations for court proceedings against alleged war criminals Radislav Grujicic and Serge Kisluk in Canada, Andre Sawoniuk and Semion Serafinowicz in England, and Heinrich Wagner in Australia. All five cases relied on evidence from eyewitness accounts. Browning’s role in the proceedings was not to provide evidence ...

  9. Abba Kovner - Vilna

    Abba Kovner lived in disguise in a convent at the beginning of the German occupation in 1941. He was a central figure in the Zionist youth resistance movement in Vilna. He commanded an underground partisan resistance group throughout the war. He describes the way the Germans avoided panic among the Jews. Kovner maintains a poetic approach to Lanzmann's questions throughout the interview. This interview took place over two days in Kovner's Kibbutz Eyn Ha'horesh (between Nethania and Hadera). FILM ID 3236 -- Camera Rolls #2,3 -- 01:00:12 to 01:24:55 CR 2 01:00:12 Kovner sits outside on a park...

  10. Margaret Anne Goldsmith Hanaw collection

    The Margaret Anne Goldsmith Hanaw collection contains correspondence between Lawrence B. Goldsmith Sr., various members of the Schiffman and Marx families living in Germany, and United States government officials. The correspondence relates to the families’ requests for assistance in immigrating to the United States from Nazi Germany in the form of signed affidavits of support and financial assistance. The personal correspondence from the families in Germany provide a sense of growing desperation to leave Germany. Also included are Lawrence B. Goldsmith Sr.’s papers relating his activity wi...

  11. Paula Biren

    Paula Biren was a young Jewish woman living in Łódź, Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939. She survived the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz. In her interview with Claude Lanzmann, Biren describes the occupation of Łódź, ghettoization, the children's Aktion of September 1942, and her deportation to Auschwitz. FILM ID 3105 -- Camera Rolls #1-4 -- 03:00:09 to (03:00:09) Biren and Lanzmann are seated outdoors. Lanzmann begins the interview by asking her to start at the beginning, the moment the Germans entered Łódź, what her feelings were, and if she knew at that time what would be at stake. She s...

  12. Black leather mid-calf boots worn by a female Jewish concentration camp prisoner

    • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    • irn520451
    • English
    • a: Height: 13.750 inches (34.925 cm) | Width: 3.875 inches (9.843 cm) | Depth: 9.750 inches (24.765 cm) b: Height: 13.750 inches (34.925 cm) | Width: 3.875 inches (9.843 cm) | Depth: 9.875 inches (25.083 cm)

    Pair of black, leather mid-calf boots worn by Alice (Ala) Brand while she was a prisoner at several concentration camps from December 1944 until April 1945. The boots were purchased for Alice by her husband, Samuel, who was working with a special science unit at Płaszów labor camp in German-occupied Poland. Samuel was escorted to and from work by two guards, and he was able to bribe them into taking him to stores to buy supplies for himself and Alice. Alice was living in Tarnów, Poland with her family when Germany invaded on September 1, 1939. A week later, German forces occupied the city. ...

  13. Motke Zaidel and Itzak Dugin

    Motke Zaidel and Itzak Dugin are survivors of Vilna. They tell the story of their extraordinary escape from the Ponari camp, digging a tunnel for months, where the dogs that caught them backed away whimpering because the men smelled of death. The interview took place over two days in the forest of Ben Shemen (an Israeli forest resembling Ponari) and in Mr. Zaidel's apartment in Peta'h Tikva with the family of Zaidel. FILM ID 3782 -- Camera Rolls 2-4 -- Foret Ponari CR2 Lanzmann, Zaidel and Dugin meet in a forest in Israel which resembles the forest of Ponari, next to Vilna. Before the war t...

  14. Pery Broad

    Pery Broad spent two years as a guard in Auschwitz Birkenau. Broad voluntarily wrote a report of his activities whilst working for the British as a translator in a POW camp after the war. The Broad Report corroborates extermination installations and the burning of corpses. This interview was filmed in 1979 with a hidden camera, known as a Paluche, which caught fire. FILM ID 3438 -- Camera Rolls 1A -- 02:00:18 to 02:12:29 Lanzmann and Broad begin the interview by discussing the recently presented television miniseries, Holocaust. Broad states that he can face the past, but cannot dominate it...

  15. Sioma and Tonia Bialer Lechtman papers

    Contains photographs and documents relating to Vera Lechtman's parents, Sioma and Tonia Bialer Lechtman, before World War II in Vienna, Austria, and in Łódź, Poland; their immigration to Palestine in 1936; and their subsequent immigration to Europe in 1938. Includes photogaphs of Sioma Lechtman in the Gurs concentration camp in France, where he was interned after fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

  16. Franz Suchomel

    Lanzmann interviewed Franz Suchomel, who was with the SS at Treblinka, in secret at the Hotel Post in April 1976. This was the first interview Lanzmann filmed with the newly developed hidden camera known as the Paluche, and he paid Suchomel 500 DM. In the outtakes, Suchomel provides further details about the treatment of Jews at the camp, as well as a more ambivalent memory of his experiences than is apparent in the released "SHOAH". FILM ID 3753 -- Camera Rolls 1-2 Lanzmann asks Suchomel to describe his arrival at Treblinka and Suchomel tells of his shock at finding himself with seven othe...

  17. Fake diamond ring bartered to save the life of a Jewish family

    Finger ring made by Abraham (Bumek) Gruber in 1942 using crystal and nickel to simulate a diamond ring. In 1943, Bumek was working as a butcher at the oil refinery camp Galizien in German occupied Poland with his wife Blimka and daughter Liba. That summer, the Germans took Blimka and Liba, and other Jewish families, and executed them in the Bronica forest. Bumek planned to give himself up in the next Aktion, but he met Tusia and her 4 year old daughter Fela and formed a bond that changed his mind. He decided to go into hiding with them in Mlynki Szkolnikowe, where his family had once lived....

  18. Sketchbook of drawings created by a former concentration camp prisoner

    Sketchbook created by Adolf Frankl, depicting scenes from multiple concentration camps. It was likely created after the war, as a way for Adolf to process his experiences during the Holocaust. Adolf was living in his hometown of Bratislava with his wife, two children, and a large extended family, when the city became part of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia in May 1939. When World War II began in September 1939, the family’s interior design store was confiscated and Aryanized. Adolf was able to continue working for the new owner, and received documentation protecting him and his family fro...

  19. Sobibor - Wlodowa (SOB)

    Interviews with local Polish people around Sobibor, Poland, including long sequences of a Catholic mass in Wlodowa. Lanzmann asks about the Jews in Wlodawa before the war and inquires how non-Jewish residents got along with the Jews. Includes shots of the Sobibor camp and environs. FILM ID 4674 -- White 15 Sobibor Gare CU, elderly woman and man sit indoors at the Sobibor train station. “Sobibor” sign. Local people sit on benches outside waiting for train. A train pulls into the station. End clapperboard: SOB 1. 01:03:03 Passengers look out the windows of the railway cars as the train depart...

  20. Henryk Gawkowski and Treblinka railway workers

    Henryk Gawkowski was a locomotive conductor at the Treblinka station and estimates that he transported approximately 18,000 Jews to the camp. He drank vodka all the time because it was the only way to make bearable his job and the smell of burning corpses. He describes the black market and the prostitution that developed around the camp. This interview also includes conversations with several other Polish witnesses who were railway workers. FILM ID 3362 -- Camera Rolls #4-7 -- 01:00:00 to 01:13:26 Gawkowski and a Polish choir sing "W mogile ciemnej ?pij na wieki," a Gregorian-chant style fu...